Comment by stalfie
25 days ago
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.