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Comment by rgblambda | Hacker News Reader

Or applying for an account could involve sending a handwritten letter by post.

Adding that much friction is also going to loose you many genuine users. Might be worth it depending on the community but if it makes newcomers fewer than your usual churn rate its a death sentence.

I think a better approach would be to upload an image to the sign up form with explicit instructions that isn't in text on the page to be easily read by AI. Like "Answer 2 in the Math captcha" even though the correct answer is 5, the AI will always enter the wrong number.

That would work for a time, like with Captchas. Then the AI would overcome it and you'd have to come up with a new idea.

True. To be fair, this was a reply to a comment about a niche community.

Though it's possible that this approach could become normalised if it's proven to work at a small scale.

Right, because I cannot possibly purchase a thousand such letters for less than the cost of minimum wage for an hour or two.

Where I live a 2nd class stamp costs the equivalent of $1.24. That's $1240 for a thousand.

Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online.

Little bit more than 2 hours minimum wage I think.

The kind of place that will make and send letters by the thousand will probably have a better deal on postage.

I'm seeing business rates for stamps is the equivalent of $1.20 per stamp. Free delivery though.

This is fucked and I hate it. Internet is (was?) about convenience and direct access. I understand there are challenges that need solutions, but this ain’t it

> was

Yep. Was.

This isn’t the internet you grow up on. This is an internet scoped for bots and organizations.

> Internet is (was?) about convenience and direct access.

Was.

Maybe you are to young to remember the (pre-spam) days when it was polite to leave your SMTP server open for others to use?

Slop as a letter is a thing already https://www.axidraw.com/

Not that I don't take your point that such a service could exist, but the site you linked explicitly says they don't offer letter writing as a service.

Also, I imagine it's not impossible to reliably distinguish between an autopen and genuine handwriting. The company who's site you linked say their machine can't perform complex pen movements so calligraphy is impossible.

The real advantage of posting a letter is that you have to pay for postage, and the stamps on the envelope will indicate which country the letter is really coming from.

If someone buys or makes something like this just to send a letter, they a) put in more human effort than writing it themselves, and b) are probably interesting and would benefit your community.

I think what robostwantdata was suggesting was that people would supply a "Use my mechanical pen for a fee" type service, where customers send the text they want written and the address they want the letter sent to.

As I've already said in my direct reply, there's still the various costs involved in posting the letter, and if the community is based on a particular geographical area e.g. "Connacht Hill Farmer's Association", then it would raise eyebrows if the envelope had a Kazakhstani stamp on it.

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