Comment by Uvix
3 months ago
Seems like restricting posts but not comments from a fresh account would thread that needle pretty well?
3 months ago
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.
True
Mm, balancing against “long-time lurker, made an account just to post this”…
Yeah, exactly. Thirteen years ago, I was a lurker. No account, because why would I make an account just to read? But when I wanted to say something badly enough, I made an account. (I think the first thing I did is post an Ask HN about functional programming, so "no posting for X time" might have turned me away.)
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.
Immediate comment privileges are really important. Lots of examples, but to give a silly one, someone pastes their clipboard without realizing it includes their API key or their email. Good Samaritans should be able to say, "Hey, I just caught something."
And, as another commenter mentions, if someone shares your work, you should be able to comment on that thread without delay.
This is the only reason I got myself a HN account: someone posted a link to a blog post of mine, and I happened to see the increased traffic on my VPS.
(And I stuck around after, a few posts are interesting enough. All the AI stuff isn't, and there is too much of that unfortunately.)
You reminded me how infuriating it was not to be able to post comments on StackOverflow. Felt like getting those few upvotes required was taking forever, and all without ability to ask for clarification.
1 reply →
It seems easy enough to circumvent: "We're launching our product in 2 weeks, so let the AI create and 'warm up' 20 new HN users so they're ready to shill".
It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(
If someone is going to put that much effort into to it, let them. I think the ideas here are to try to get some low hanging fruit to see if that works “good enough”. You’ll never block all AI generated accounts, but you may not have to and still have the desired effect.
But if someone wants to plant 20 new accounts, grow them out with karma votes, so that they can game the voting, there are probably other ways to detect that.
1 reply →
Any amount of friction reduces the amount of slop. What proportion of clankers are going to realize that they need to warm up the accounts two weeks in advance? Answer: a proportion that your never going to see with that barrier in place.
With a couple few layers of defense, you'll weed out almost all of the bad actors. Without strong monetary incentives for spamming, you also avoid most persistent actors.
7 replies →
Requiring accounts to be a certain age does not help and will only affect legitimate users. The slopsters will simply create accounts, wait a bit and start posting then.
Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra
Oh damn, that's the one who posted the AskHN about the verified job portal on the frontpage today. Either this is some chilling still in build up, or it's an actual human being with severe LLM slop impersonation derangement syndrome.
Yikes. That account is like the epitome of LLM posting. It's a shame, too, because it makes me feel less inclined to read discussion on this forum.
1 reply →
didn't even bother not using an em dash...
If most people are like my on that topic, then they use HN without an account, until they want to post or comment something, then they try to find out how to create an account. If they won't be able to post or comment then, then they will just not create or retain that account.
I was able to have discussions where one party has significantly unpopular opinions. Such discussions are unique to HN, please don't kill them.
[flagged]
If that were to happen, I'd also suggest that comments from fresh accounts should also have URLs deleted or disabled.
Even something like…
Example[.]com
But don’t worry, HN has been thoughtful about links from new accounts for months and months (can’t speak for longer, but maybe/probably). Effort could well be duplicative unless I’m unaware of some more granular detail.