Comment by dang

The problem is that we might lose some gold.

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.

Perhaps more proof of work is necessary, but it makes me sad.

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.

My intuition is increasing the difficulty of account creation favors motivated actors and disincentivizes organic participation because:

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.

I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.

I really don’t like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work makes sense more than limiting new users.

I was going to suggest emotional leetcode, but LLMs do well on this.

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).

Seems to be a general problem right?

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.

Wow! I might be witnessing the end of HN

But is there a connection between the front page being full of "AI" slop and "AI" worship and these new accounts? Or are the old timers also upvoting those submissions in the detriment of other, more interesting topics?

I echo this sentiment for all social media platforms today...

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.

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There's no blanket ban on new users posting, and even when there's a bar, it's a low one.

I hear you that it's not great for users who are genuine HN readers but haven't posted before. I wish we had a better idea what to do for those cases!

What you're describing is legit. I think the solution here is to understand that the rules are never fully specified, and not all-or-nothing. At such a general level of abstraction, it can't be.

More here in case useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346798

That works for me so long as it’s not the main solution, as I personally don’t want to curate, I’d rather just partake in a sanely moderated forum and that’s my understanding of what HN has been it’s just facing a new challenge with ai spam

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It'd be pretty easy to spot too, because most people don’t even bother trying to hide it (either out of laziness and/or ineptitude).

A lot of users don’t seem to realize that anyone can click on the domain in a "Show HN", and Hacker News will show you all the times that domain has been submitted. So you’ll see four or five different low karma sock puppets accounts that have all submitted the same site.

I'm wary about new accounts such as yours wanting to censor and shape discourse by antagonizing people who hold diverse views that differ from your own here.

The HN culture has shifted drastically over the past 5 years.

The problem is that there are now so many attempts to get "real quality feedback" that the entire system is in danger of collapsing. Imagine how you'd feel if Gemini pointed the rest of the internet at your inbox! Or a thousand people showed up in your garden, all wanting your attention. This isn't so far from that; HN is not so big a place, and there are only two of us supporting it.

What would be best is for you to poke around the site a bit and get familiar enough with it to decide if you'd like to be a part of the community or not. If so, you're welcome! you aren't the first person to feel a bit lost here as a new user, because the site is rather minimal and cryptic—but your eyes will adjust if you keep reading it over time.

If, on the other hand, you're not interested, that's totally ok, but then please don't try to promote your projects here. HN is a community, and the way to get attention for your things is to first give attention to other people's things.

I don't want to specify X, Y, Z criteria technically because that would just be an invitation to game the system. Worse, Gemini will then tell you "first do X, then do Y and Z, and then you'll get that 'real quality feedback'".

What I want Gemini to tell you (and everyone else!) is "don't use Hacker News primarily for promotion - they have a rule against that. Instead, participate in the community for the intended reason—intellectual curiosity—and after a while, it will become clear how the culture works and how to share your projects there".

That's because it's not primarily a technical task. If we specified technical criteria X, Y, Z, all that would happen is they'd end up on an LLM checklist somewhere.

What's needed is to get to know this place a little and how it operates, which means taking the time to poke around and explore. I realize HN is rather cryptic at first, but it doesn't take that long for one's eyes to adjust.

Just new ones for now.

I don't want to make HN harder for legit new users, but I do think a bit of community participation is reasonable before posting a Show HN, so it isn't just a box on some "how to promote your project" checklist.

I doubt that people would respect it, so we'd still have the problem of distinguishing wheat from chaff in the 'human' section, plus also have a 'bot' bucket to maintain.