Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.
Not too seldom have I seen the author or a significant party of a story chime in through a fresh green account, as they were alerted by the story being posted here one way or another. And usually when they do it's very interesting.
As such I would find it detrimental if they had to jump through too many hoops so they don't bother or it takes too long so the thread dies before they can participate.
Example[.]com
But don’t worry, HN has been thoughtful about links from new accounts for months and months (can’t speak for longer, but maybe/probably). Effort could well be duplicative unless I’m unaware of some more granular detail.
Mm, balancing against “long-time lurker, made an account just to post this”…
And, as another commenter mentions, if someone shares your work, you should be able to comment on that thread without delay.
(And I stuck around after, a few posts are interesting enough. All the AI stuff isn't, and there is too much of that unfortunately.)
It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(
But if someone wants to plant 20 new accounts, grow them out with karma votes, so that they can game the voting, there are probably other ways to detect that.
We rely on friction for most of our social norms.
With a couple few layers of defense, you'll weed out almost all of the bad actors. Without strong monetary incentives for spamming, you also avoid most persistent actors.
We live with GenAI, and the human to bot ratio is now leaning in a different direction. The old norms are dead, because the old structures that held them up are gone.
This idea that theres “more hoops - losing participation” on this thread keeps assuming that the community is unaffected by the macro trends.
It’s weirdly positing that HN posts and users, are somehow immune/unaffected by those trends.
The main subreddits will basically shadowban you until your account is aged and has more than X karma.
There are a lot of flaws, though. Their appeal system is very broken, for instance.
Reddit hasn't been as overrun by bots yet, for the most part, although how long they can hold out I don't know.
Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra
Oh damn, that's the one who posted the AskHN about the verified job portal on the frontpage today. Either this is some chilling still in build up, or it's an actual human being with severe LLM slop impersonation derangement syndrome.
It's still a small minority of comments, but it's definitely getting a problem and just the chance — even if it's small one — of talking to a bot, rather than a human causes inhibition. Finding out that one has been talking to a bot is finding out you've been scammed. You invest time and human emotions into something for another human to read, even if it's just a quick HN comment, just to find out that it was all for nothing. It sucks the humanity out of it and thereby out of oneself. You get tricked into spending your valuable limited human social energy on soulless machines with infinite capacity of generating worthless slop instead of on other humans.
I was able to have discussions where one party has significantly unpopular opinions. Such discussions are unique to HN, please don't kill them.
This doesn't mean it doesn't have a strong sense of what bad behavior is. It clearly does.
Everything else seems to eventually cause new blood to dry up.
And about the same frequency you’d be assigned to metamoderate, basically being asked if a moderator’s “vote” was a good one or not (you didn’t have to fully agree you’d do the same, just that it wasn’t bad).
Someone who scored low in meta moderation would get less or no moderator chances.
1. some interesting projects gets to HN main page
2. author of the project is not on HN so creates a green account and interacts
even if that person would have the patience to stick around, by the time they would be able to respond, it would be too late for it to be relevant to the (now stale) discussion.
This is a fundamental part of how HN sees its own functioning; they refer to it as "rate limiting".
For sure a problem worth considering.
I can't think of anything easy...
Only even remotely sensible thought I have at present:
We add a check box to replies created by new accounts. Maybe created by all accounts?
The prompt reads something to the effect of: I am mentioned in the article. And then they get to say how.
-This is my project -I am mentioned by name -Etc...
Whatever it is they wrote, appears somehow, maybe as a required line or something.
Others can see that and either flag the account or vouch.
This at least some what distributes the required attention load.
That said, I don't like it. Have nothing better, so here it is!
Then others seeing that
I don't think the solution is changing the dynamic but flagging, this site self-moderates quite well, aside from dang and tomhow's great work.
Reddit has forums where you need a minimum karma to post to certain subreddits and that is typically upvotes on your comments, but it could also be upvotes on someone else’s moderated subreddit.
Because if new account restrictions create enough friction, you lose legitimate users who periodically rotate accounts for privacy reasons.
At some point the annoyance tips toward just lurking, and a forum where only old accounts talk is a stagnant forum given enough time.
Feel free to send me an email (findable via my HN profile) mentioning that you found it via this thread, and I’m happy to extend an invite.
(a bit more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384, with a reply from the OP)
Would seem to require some discernment to classify. Not all assistive use is slop.
> Not all assistive use is slop.
That's right, and the key is to discern which posts/projects are interesting.
It's obviously says LLM to me at first read through.
I suspect that:
a) less people are willing to expend a bit of energy to notice LLM usage given how much of it is. ("we've lost" theory)
b) that people are losing the ability to detect LLM submissions. ("we're cooked" theory)
or c) that people don't care about the use of LLM. ("who cares" theory).
Personally I've been feeling less invested, because it seems as if most users don't care and even the main users of the site don't notice it.
I should clarify and revise my thoughts and initial comment. I do not think that not being able to detect it leads to lack of care. I actually think that many things have passed me by and in the future this will be even more as LLMs improve ("we're cooked").
As to "what do we do when we spot it" - you hit the nail on the head of the feelings I felt as I was writing the comment. What do we actually do, what can we change and should we attempt futile things?
And even the example dang gave - the actual submission as very good. Is any amount of LLM use okay and what's the level? I use LLMs at work but I don't like writing readmes or blog posts with it. But others might like writing code at work by hand and don't like writing text so use LLMs for that. Maybe I lower my expectations!
Who aside from Fred fucking Durst writes like that?
Ugh... Clearly llm generated. This is how internet has become. 90% of posts are variations of tropes like these.
> I am sooo tired of statements like "No x. No y. No z." and then optionally "Just Foo.". Who aside from Fred fucking Durst writes like that?
Rumor had it that there is also some kind of social-network metric detecting when socially adjacent accounts (or alts) are engaged in astroturfing, the practice where a small cabal tries to pass themselves off as a broader grassroots campaign.
Flip that around though and the same metrics might allow new accounts to be meaningfully vouched for by existing ones.
what I’m seeing is new or sleeper accounts that have been idle for over a decade with low (<99) karma getting into comment circles. Over the last couple of weeks i’ll see several top comments on articles with back and forth between other similar accounts… it’s got to the point that I check a user habitually before I even bother reading… and I have never hidden so many comments before getting to something substantive in the comments…
Like many here, I don’t wish to limit new users, but this does seem from my armchair perspective to be a pattern to be on the look out for.
I've noticed this kind of behavior on Reddit but never on HM
So maybe some sort of filter like that? Only show it to those kinds of accounts at first?
The downside is that if that group isn't big enough you get a lot of groupthink, but if your sample is wide enough, it can be avoided. To be honest, I don't recall why we stopped doing it.
Well, the simplest automated method would be to run the post and comment together through an LLM with a prompt that's roughly:
"Is this person claiming to be the author or co-creator of the work discussed in this submission?"
Only green accounts subject to it. I predict you'd probably have a very low false positive and false negative rate.
It's of course a terribly slippery slope. My perhaps overly-cynical take is that once the infra is place some of your bosses would be prone to eventually abusing it.
Personally I'm here for it: Dang, moderator turned whistleblower—on the run from dark VC money—in a race against time to save freedom. Still working on a title for the film.
McDang II: You Have the Right to Remain Shadowbanned
A few people in these comments seem wildly confident that it is written by an LLM. If anything, I hope it was written by a human as an elaborate troll to trigger these so-called immaculate LLM detectors.
New account can be invited or vouched for by an old account with good karma. If an account that you vouched for starts spamming and/or slopposting, you lose your vouching for abilities for a period of time or forever.
If the discussion is related to a public project, like in the examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303604
...you can use existing communication channels (website, readme on github) to ask people for an invite to participate in it.
It’s perhaps unintentional, but your framing makes it seem that this is a baseless whimsy.
At this point, it appears that we will be talking to bots more than humans.
It’s a brave new world, and not adapting to it will see the humans leave.
I still remember creating my HN account. It stands out in my memory, because it was the smoothest, simplest, easiest, and quickest account creation of my life.
I had lurked here for around a decade before finally creating an account. Any urge to participate was thwarted by my resistance toward creating accounts (I just hate account creation for some reason). But HN's account creation process was a breath of fresh air. "You mean it can be this easy? Why isn't it this easy everywhere? If I had known how simple it was, I would have created an HN account years earlier, lol."
It was especially stunning to me, because I think the discourse on HN is generally of a higher quality than most other sites (which I wouldn't naturally associate with such an easy account creation process).
It's my only fond memory of account creation (along with maybe when I created an account on America-Online back in the 90s, since that was my first ever account and it was all so novel). Just a few quick seconds, and then I'm already commenting on HN. It was beautiful. I remain delighted.
I kind of assumed it was hard to make an account (maybe even an invite-only situation) based purely off of how unique most handles were, and how well curated/moderated everything was. So I guess you could say, the quality of the usernames and the quality of the posts :)
1. ideological and/or economically motivated actors will just see it as a cost of doing business.
2. Ordinary sign-up friction is more likely to make HN appear ordinary to anyone who stumbles upon it.
3. Sign-up friction is a moat. The strength of HN is moderation of what gets in.
People share things that they often wouldn’t. And somehow the culture remains mostly civil. It’s a pretty fantastic forum IMHO.
Changing the rules would surely change the vibe, so to speak.
But will it continue under all the login id surveillance laws coming up?
I'm curious to hear what benefits you think can be gained from avoiding this.
Suggestion: Pick a long term account, dump the comments, and see what an llm could figure out about the target
even if they did ban me: the account was going to be deleted in a short while regardless. So that fear isn't present for what's essentially a longer lasting throwaway.
If you intend your accounts to be thrown away, you will likely behave worse.
*I'm using "you" generically, I don't mean you specifically.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260228135203/https://www.brain...
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/351103
https://web.archive.org/web/20250713080832/https://www.usmcm...
I'm well aware that the cyberlibertarian ethos endemic here opposes any form of regulation. But when the status quo clearly isn't working something has to change. Parent's have failed to step up and do their jobs. Somebody else has to.
When given a conversation about Alice and Suzy having a one-upmanship conversation (my husband rich, my kid is a genius) and what emotions they are feeling, and what Suzy could have said instead to improve the conversation, it gave accurate responses (e.g. they're feeling insecure, competitive, envy).
The standard solution is using an email to register account, maybe a cloudflare captcha, and then using good network logging to group accounts by IPs and chainbanning abusive accounts when they are caught by other mechanisms.
At least new accounts are more obvious here. This pattern has been increasingly used for scams, spam and AI slop on Instagram, X and Facebook for years.