Comment by laborcontract
3 months ago
Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.
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.
Indeed. Here is a recent litmus test: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384, with a reply from the OP)
One thing we did at reddit for a while was put posts from new people in "jail". They would show up in a special yellow box at the top of the home page to accounts that tended to be early upvoters of things that became successful later (our Nostradamusus so to speak), and then if it got enough upvotes from that group it got out of jail and placed on the regular /new page.
So maybe some sort of filter like that? Only show it to those kinds of accounts at first?
The downside is that if that group isn't big enough you get a lot of groupthink, but if your sample is wide enough, it can be avoided. To be honest, I don't recall why we stopped doing it.
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Just sharing observations it may help, it may not…
what I’m seeing is new or sleeper accounts that have been idle for over a decade with low (<99) karma getting into comment circles. Over the last couple of weeks i’ll see several top comments on articles with back and forth between other similar accounts… it’s got to the point that I check a user habitually before I even bother reading… and I have never hidden so many comments before getting to something substantive in the comments…
Like many here, I don’t wish to limit new users, but this does seem from my armchair perspective to be a pattern to be on the look out for.
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Maybe have a signup flow where you can skip the new account restriction by putting some file on a website of some currently trending link. And then the restriction is lifted temporarily for the thread linking to it?
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I have often heard that vote rigging is detectable on HN because the site software penalizes voting from accounts at the same IP address.
Rumor had it that there is also some kind of social-network metric detecting when socially adjacent accounts (or alts) are engaged in astroturfing, the practice where a small cabal tries to pass themselves off as a broader grassroots campaign.
Flip that around though and the same metrics might allow new accounts to be meaningfully vouched for by existing ones.
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Sorry, I need to ask the dumb question: Is that Show HN (AsteroidOS) post written by an LLM or not? Honestly, I cannot tell.
A few people in these comments seem wildly confident that it is written by an LLM. If anything, I hope it was written by a human as an elaborate troll to trigger these so-called immaculate LLM detectors.
Interesting litmus test, as the post isn't just green, it's riddled with LLM copyediting. Doesn't read as if originally composed by an LLM, so there's that.
Would seem to require some discernment to classify. Not all assistive use is slop.
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You would need, say, a StackExchange-like crowdsourced moderation system whereby users with relatively high karma are randomly selected to check posts from new account, by casting votes to reject or keep.
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>How can we filter the lightweight stuff while still benefiting from posts like these?
Well, the simplest automated method would be to run the post and comment together through an LLM with a prompt that's roughly:
"Is this person claiming to be the author or co-creator of the work discussed in this submission?"
Only green accounts subject to it. I predict you'd probably have a very low false positive and false negative rate.
It's of course a terribly slippery slope. My perhaps overly-cynical take is that once the infra is place some of your bosses would be prone to eventually abusing it.
Personally I'm here for it: Dang, moderator turned whistleblower—on the run from dark VC money—in a race against time to save freedom. Still working on a title for the film.
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Responding from a new account is different from posting from a new account. You aren’t vetting people by making accounts have a minimum age to post articles. That’ll just cause people to make accounts before they need them.
Reddit has forums where you need a minimum karma to post to certain subreddits and that is typically upvotes on your comments, but it could also be upvotes on someone else’s moderated subreddit.
I think the right people will stick around. There is a certain kind of indivudal that has the paitence to understand that a system that restricts new accounts from post is a good thing. Of recent, there have been a lot of posters that come here from the open web just to try and slant opinion.
But sticking around doesn't solve the scenario mentioned by parent.
1. some interesting projects gets to HN main page
2. author of the project is not on HN so creates a green account and interacts
even if that person would have the patience to stick around, by the time they would be able to respond, it would be too late for it to be relevant to the (now stale) discussion.
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I believe HN's success is in large part not presuming to have a good idea of what "the right people" are.
This doesn't mean it doesn't have a strong sense of what bad behavior is. It clearly does.
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I am only that kind of individual when I'm inclined to post unconstructively – not that I know that, at the time. When I'm feeling constructive, friction is likely to make me take my constructive energies elsewhere.
The SA Forums model does accomplish the goals of filtering out noise, but then you’re stuck with a stagnant community of “the right people.”
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Seems like restricting posts but not comments from a fresh account would thread that needle pretty well?
I'm surprised posts aren't restricted a bit more. Maybe that's just my old school "lurk moar" mentality, but I feel like I really need to understand the vibes of a community before I start to contribute posts to it.
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I'd suggest: new accounts are read-only for at least a week. Then they can comment (rate limited at first, gradually relaxed) and vote, and then after some additional amount of time and/or karma they can submit a post. Maybe some of these mechanisms are already in place? Bots can probably game this too but drive-by bots maybe won't be patient enough.
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If that were to happen, I'd also suggest that comments from fresh accounts should also have URLs deleted or disabled.
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Totally.
I don't think the solution is changing the dynamic but flagging, this site self-moderates quite well, aside from dang and tomhow's great work.
This problem can be solved by an invite/vouch for system.
New account can be invited or vouched for by an old account with good karma. If an account that you vouched for starts spamming and/or slopposting, you lose your vouching for abilities for a period of time or forever.
I didn't know anybody here before I joined. (I have been here for a few years, and I still don't know anybody here.) How would a person like me get invited or vouched?
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Yes that is exactly what I just did, some of us are just getting around to having time to post
These changes aren’t being suggested in a vacuum.
It’s perhaps unintentional, but your framing makes it seem that this is a baseless whimsy.
At this point, it appears that we will be talking to bots more than humans.
It’s a brave new world, and not adapting to it will see the humans leave.
Heh until this moment I thought green was a respected account somehow - like moderators on Reddit
the death of the press should give you all the answers you need on this one.
Honest question, what are the alternatives to HN?
Because if new account restrictions create enough friction, you lose legitimate users who periodically rotate accounts for privacy reasons.
At some point the annoyance tips toward just lurking, and a forum where only old accounts talk is a stagnant forum given enough time.
Lobste.rs comes to mind. High enough friction that, even as a seasoned participant here, I haven’t tried over there yet.
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I think we've gone from the eternal September to the eternal December
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.
Somehow I've been browsing HN since ~2019 without ever wanting to reply so much that I was willing to make an account (and start receiving emails, etc) but your comment made me curious how easy it could be, and wow. Now I have an account.
I kind of assumed it was hard to make an account (maybe even an invite-only situation) based purely off of how unique most handles were, and how well curated/moderated everything was. So I guess you could say, the quality of the usernames and the quality of the posts :)
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.
Same, though I'm also surprised how easy I can make new accounts for this site. But I love that. Hope it doesn't require me to jump through a bunch of hoops in the future.
I think yours might be extreme. But I think the anonymity here is widely appreciated. And frankly necessarily relies on easy creation of accounts.
People share things that they often wouldn’t. And somehow the culture remains mostly civil. It’s a pretty fantastic forum IMHO.
Changing the rules would surely change the vibe, so to speak.
I appreciate the anonymity. Posting as throwaway is often useful to distance the poster from $work or $ex or other situations yet contribute to a conversation.
But will it continue under all the login id surveillance laws coming up?
You are aware of the guidelines? (You are not fostering community)
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Technically, every HN account is a throw-away account. ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260228135203/https://www.brain...
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/351103
https://web.archive.org/web/20250713080832/https://www.usmcm...
Thanks, I was not aware. They seem to be guidelines, and not rules. I find my privacy and the prevention of anyone to build a full profile of me (especially how easy that is now in the age of LLMs) a bit more important than the vague concept of "fostering community". I am sorry.
Just like how HN itself can't be immune from macro trends, neither can its users, and macro trends have unfortunately made this a necessity for many of them.
I think the problem is you can be tracked by your email when you sign up for a new account. So I am not sure how this can be helpful.
This matters when you're hiding from the website. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to hide such things from the public.
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My HN account has no email. Not sure whether it would still be possible for a new account.
On Reddit and Hacker News, I don't need an email address to sign up. But also I use SimpleLogin to have a separate email address per website/account. Quite necessary these days when personal data is leaked by some company or other every day.
> not too much of my post history accumulates in one account
I'm curious to hear what benefits you think can be gained from avoiding this.
I do the same. It simply means theres less accidental leakage / self-doxing that could be pieced together if you (or llm) read every comment on the account.
Suggestion: Pick a long term account, dump the comments, and see what an llm could figure out about the target
I do it sometimes just to restrict my own pride in the account. I get a buzz from upvotes and that upsets me on a deeper level.
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You can build quite an extensive profile of someone given enough post history. More post history means more details. Especially nowadays with LLMs it's trivial. This can lead to all sorts of issues. One is people I know in real life being able to identify me. Another is that through various means my account may be linked to my personal identity (e.g. through matching usernames or emails across platforms) and oppressive regimes (now or in the feature) may use my post history to take action against me.
Honestly, it's probably good if platforms disincentivize this. If you know creating a new account is high friction, you are more likely to take care of the account you have, and be a higher quality member.
If you intend your accounts to be thrown away, you will likely behave worse.
*I'm using "you" generically, I don't mean you specifically.
Your behavior is only an outlier because we don't teach kids basic security practices and so they don't grow up into adults who think like that. We also don't teach kids how to avoid "Internet addiction" dopamine chasing, so seeing a number (eg: karma score) get smaller instead of bigger hurts feefees.
I'm well aware that the cyberlibertarian ethos endemic here opposes any form of regulation. But when the status quo clearly isn't working something has to change. Parent's have failed to step up and do their jobs. Somebody else has to.
Reddit didn't ban you? I got banned for that lmao
Never got banned for it, though my "rotations" tend to be "a few weeks every year".
even if they did ban me: the account was going to be deleted in a short while regardless. So that fear isn't present for what's essentially a longer lasting throwaway.
Reddit didn't (yet). Another tech focused community site did though... So I stopped participating in the community.
I really don’t like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work makes sense more than limiting new users.
What would this proof of work scenario, instead of restricting new user content, look like?
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).
That type of question could also turn people off. We already have too many discussions where people are quick to jump to conclusions and attribute intent, rather than asking basic questions.
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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