Comment by wvlia5

25 days ago

This seems to be a bot comment. HN will lose its value if these bots are not purged.

This is an urgent problem, but it can probably not be solved without some kind of "verified human 2FA" like the Norwegian BankID + facial recognition.

Knowing the HN audience, this will never happen. And so the site is doomed.

  • I think it could be solved still pseudononymously: introduce a "vouch" button that allows a user to vouch that another user is human. This is consequential both for the vouched-for and vouching accounts. Run a page-rank style algorithm on the graph of vouches to generate a certainty score for the humanity of each account. For repeated posters this should converge to a correct answer fairly quickly. There is still a challenge for green accounts, but having degraded experience for new users is not a doom scenario for the site.

Moderators: banning all accounts since 2025 from posting would be better than doing nothing. Not the solution we want, but what we have for now.

Can you explain to me what makes this an obvious bot comment? I'm not doubting it, I just don't understand.

What makes you think that? Genuine question, as I’ve not flagged it as such in my mind.