Comment by magicalhippo

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

If that were to happen, I'd also suggest that comments from fresh accounts should also have URLs deleted or disabled.

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?

Lobste.rs comes to mind. High enough friction that, even as a seasoned participant here, I haven’t tried over there yet.