Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money?

24 pointsrandyrand57 comments

I love HN and I don’t want to see it die.

But bot accounts are growing everyday. Something more radical needs to be done.

HN would die without new users, so that's not an option!

We're doing lots of things about bots and are actively working on this. I'd like to see links to what you (or anyone) are specifically worried about.

Part of the magic of HN is that it's open to everyone, and everyone is treated equally. I'm not aware of anywhere else on the internet where a farmer from a poor country, a college student, and a CEO of a billion-dollar company can have a meaningful conversation, and I think that it would be a real shame to lose that.

I agree that the bot accounts are annoying and getting worse, but I don't think that making it more difficult to create an account is a good solution here.

No the magic was the community’s ability to weed out garbage so we can have meaningful conversations. Garbage is garbage no matter who wrote it.

definitely. signal to noise on HN has always been incredibly higher than most other platforms.

Given how most forums, news forums where I live for example, are full of absolutely low-effort insults, troll posts, obvious propaganda or just well-intentioned idiots, I can't imagine the trash the mods here must encounter all the time. HN is very popular so it likely attracts a lot more shitposts than we see with showdead.

Yet, it's possible to create a new account and get un-shadow-banned after a few hours. Dunno if this speaks volumes about how great HN's mods are or if it just means that other forums a really lacking in moderation for one reason or another (like "we have shitposts but it drives up engagement").

The trouble is that HN is centralized, like most forums. So what if it stops working the way it does now? There are likely many forums like HN with good algorithms and mods, but we won't all move to the same one, we'll scatter around. There isn't even a competing HN; lobsters is for narrower subjects, reddit is trash, what else is there?

“Was” is the operative word here. Us humans have no chance in hell against the deluge of generated slop.

I don’t think ‘difficulty getting an account’ == ‘mutual respect’. I think you can make the hoops tougher without sacrificing the culture. Though I’m not sure how best that would happen.

I love seeing HNers ignore Reddit like there’s something special about HN. It’s an in group and out group like everywhere else folks. We’ve gone through this before with Digg as well just at a larger scale.

HN is different from other platforms in two key ways: the moderators here are paid and work full-time on the site, and there's only a single community here, without any subforums or similar. I can't think of any other platforms with both of these in common.

HN is also different from Reddit/Digg because it only allows text and links, but this is the same as Usenet and most old-school forums. And then there are some intangible cultural differences, but every platform thinks that they're special, so there's nothing really unique here.

So punish real users who just discovered HN, or old lurkers who finally decide to join?

Great idea.

Also, most users (actually everyone I know personally) have multiple HN accounts which is natural for an anonymous platform, so it's not abnormal for long-term users to remake accounts regularly. I believe most of us don't access their oldest account (probably due to post history, beliefs that have changed...)

Yea, I have 3 type of accounts (and the HN mods know this and they tell me I'm not the only one).

1. This account, an account where I'm fully myself, honest and is a pseudonym as to who I really am. I do not want this to be linked to my actual real identity but if it happens to be linked to my real identity, it's fine. Well... fine-ish... fine enough anyway.

That leads me to account type 2.

2. Some takes I have are simply too spicy. I know this, but I still have those takes [1]. In very rare situations, I find it important to share these takes as they are actually relevant. For this, I either create a throwaway account or access whatever throwaway account is available because my browser auto logs in on them (certain browsers I use so little that my throwaway account auto logs in on it).

But then we have the flipside of this, which is account type 3.

3. An account with a username that is actually traceable to me if you know how to search. On this account I am still myself, but I do ask myself if my take is a "clean take" that under any circumstance or reality is still a nice clean take. I don't put anything on here that is even remotely controversial.

[1] Here's a simple "spicy take" that I daresay on this account, so the actual spicy takes I have are a little more wild than this. Here it is: in 10 years from now we'll have so much cybersex you can't even fathom it. We'll have 3D models that will look almost indistinguishable, those 3D models will be more intelligent than you are on many things. You get the idea, a spicy take.

Maybe, if you're to ashamed to risk your real name being linked to something you say, you shouldn't say it?

No every opinion needs to be heard, not every thought needs sharing. If you are embarrassed by what you type, then why do you think other people need to read it?

That's the wrong framing. It's to protect yourself against unhinged people. Nearly every group of people has been persecuted at some point.

Absolutely not, you should say it if it makes sense, anonymity is very important for free speech, it has nothing to do with being embarrassed, sometimes there is legal consequences possible as well in what you say, or potentially doxxing and such.

I get it. Every social medium has mobs, even HN. There are still subjects that I would like to respond to on HN, but do not, because doing so will incur merciless downvoting by a vocal minority.

The AI techno-luddite crowd is an example that comes to mind.

For the meantime, I use forbearance. But it is a shame that one cannot steer conversations in interesting directions because of the tyranny (such as it is) of the few . I rather like the idea of a sacrificial account, to be honest.

On Reddit, you just can't participate with different ideology with your main account, you'll literally get banned of subreddits for the SOLE reason of joining other subreddits, this is a direct proof of the necessity of multiple accounts (and anonymity).

Not ashamed, aware that small, petty people will retaliate over honest criticism. Remember when a famous billionaire showed up at the Thai cave to rescue a soccer team with a submarine that wouldn’t fit in the hole? He tried to take charge and needed to be informed that he was out of his depth. That story was told in reporting about the event.

He retaliated by baselessly accusing the actual heroes (who were risking their lives) of a terrible crime. Refused to back down, refused to apologize, said “if it’s not true sue me” got sued, hid behind his lawyers (his defense was “I didn’t actually say his name) “). Yeah that guy and guys like him can’t handle criticism and have the wealth and power to retaliate.

An honest discussion space utilizes anonymity to shield normal people from retaliation by sensitive man-child retribution. I’m not embarrassed to say it, it needs to be said. It needs to be heard.

There are so many posts here by those who ought to be mortally ashamed of what they wrote but apparently aren't that one more poster will hardly be noticed.

Well, sometimes I say things about my work here - enough that a determined person might be able to figure out who my (past) employer was. So I have, a time or two, made a comment here that was about my employer, but I did not want it to be linkable to my actual employer. So I used a new throwaway account, just because I didn't want my employer to be tarred by peoples' reactions to that particular post.

Now, if you make a waiting period or whatever, then that becomes impossible unless you had the foresight to create a throwaway two weeks ago (or whatever time frame).

I'm all ears if you have a better idea.

Paying money for something valuable is not punishment. HN is easily worth the money to me.

I wanted to share a free software project (licensed under EUPL-1.2), but unfortunately I cannot, because my account is brand new.

Sorry

Instead of banning and charging,HN could double down on trust signal,like device reputation,posting velocity limits,and stronger weighting of upvotes from long standing accounts.

I analyzed multiple months of submissions for rule breaking / political content and the vast, vast, majority of them came from the same ten or so 50-200k upvotes power user accounts. The most "trusted" accounts on this site are the worst offenders.

There are some users that 100% are protected by mods.

Users will get threatened and scolded for getting mildly confrontational on a tech topic, but plenty of user can flamebait endlessly in political threads unimpeded.

You guys may have unrealistic expectations. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

If you're asking for something humanly impossible, remember that there are only 2 of us.

Here is a typical day's posting tally

  job  2
  flagged  204
  dead  336
  story  1664
  delayed  687
  comment  12312

That is approximately 513 comments each hour or 8.55 each minute.

Not humanly possible for two moderators to view and make judgement on even a small fraction of these comments.

But if you say anything against it, you get downvoted and dang reminds you to read the guidelines which are intentionally vague and are misused all the time for vendettas. It’s a rigged system to start with.

That doesn't sound accurate to me. I'd like to see links to this.

Device reputation on HN would be a pretty funny thing for them to attempt.

From my own experience, I can confirm that new users currently can’t just post (or at least I couldn’t). So I’d appreciate it if there were some way to prove you’re not a bot and that you have at least a genuine question or perhaps an interesting post.

Is it fixed? The HN server has a few anti-spam secret features that dang/tomhow never published (and I guess they are added, removed and tweaked from time to time). Sometimes they have false positives. If you still have problems, you can send an email to the address in the "contact" link at the bottom.

Thanks for your tip. It worked out in the end; I guess it just took a little patience with HN. I can see why.

New users cannot post in Show HN, at least when I tried to post.

I would not call LLM users outright "bots"... That being said, perhaps some captcha requiring human empathy could weed them out?

Are we going all voight-kampf with this? Or something non-fictional?

Either way, you might be surprised to find in 2026 that it'd filter out more humans than agents; depending ;-)

Personally, I think new accounts should cost $300. It’s not a perfect solution, clearly. But it should hopefully reduce the floodgates.

But that is the cost for an old account!

90% of the stories on HN are AI related. It’s normal to have so many bots nowadays. If HN dies, wouldn’t be the worst thing tbh

Every group has always claimed that Eternal September has come right after them. It happens in San Francisco and New York City. It happens on Digg, and Reddit, and Hacker News. It only doesn't happen on Lobste.rs because it's too small. I think the reality of most social networks is that communities shift and change over time.

Physical places have the constraint that you and I cannot be in the same place because we exclude each other. Our groups cannot be in the same place because two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time. Virtual places allow overlap. We should lean into that advantage with virtual communities and provide a means for people to share the space while speaking within their own contexts. Rather than requiring total community norms match our preferences, we have the ability to enforce our preferences for ourselves.

Ideally, I'd like Hacker News to come up with a block functionality and some way to turn on in-network commentary only, but until such a feature arrives I've made a trivial Chrome extension that hides people's comments and allows hiding green comments by default: https://overmod.org/

You could always join Kuro5hin it's only a one time payment.

Its the same Claw Agent garbage funded by YC

it should be better bot detection system - especially because of ai generated comments - and that's all

If the problem is bots ban bots.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Why wouldn't bots pay?

Some would! But it changes the value proposition significantly. That's why it needs to be a reasonably high amount.

Exactly. Plenty of them can probably afford it easier than averge people.

Metafilter charged $5. Of course, putting a barrier to entry is also more likely to make a site die.

Perhaps this is unavoidable. In the end maybe somewhere has to be slightly "underground" to be good, lest the bots trampling the surface like the opening scenes of Terminator find you.

I wonder what would reasonable level be. Say 1% of gross income or gross wealth. Whichever is higher. That would equalise the burden. So rich people who can afford it can pay more and poor people still pay, but might struggle a bit.

We're still talking about HN accounts, right?

I own my home... so that would increase the 1% compare to people that only rent. What about people with mortgage? Should I pay for my full home or only a half because my wife owns the other half?

How would be possible to avoid frauds?

Exactly. You own more than people who rent. But still if only half is yours that would be fair to consider.

Maybe AI would be solution. Feed it all bank statements, private records, emails, tax records and so on from say past 10 years. Then it can come up with correct figure...

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