Comment by carlgreene

Even the title is in "x, not y" format.

Sufficiently advanced "AI" is indistinguishable from a linkedin true believer koolaid drinker middle management type.

I wish there was an internet-wide "don't show again" button for such slop pages

The decline of Facebook is sad. I liked it early on. I used it primarily to follow family and casual friends from high school. When they posted, it would show up on my feed, I read all the posts, and that was that.

After awhile I had to wade through all sorts of nonsense to get to the posts I actually wanted to see, and even later Facebook stopped putting posts from people I follow in my feed. It was 100% garbage. I can't imagine why anyone uses Facebook for anything other than the marketplace.

Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.

PGP’s web of trust was kinda bad privacy-wise in some regards, as it basically revealed your IRL social network.

If my PGP public key has 6 signatures and they’re all members of the East Manitoba Arch Linux User Group, you can probably work out pretty easily which Michael T I am.

Are there successful newer designs, which avoid this problem?

> Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user.

It's probably better to call this something like vouching and leave "attestation" as the contemptible power grab by megacorps delenda est. The advantage in using the same word for a useful thing as a completely unrelated vile thing only goes to the villain.

Then how can you have a community that is welcoming to people who are not part of the ingroup?

I want to create a community for immigrants. How would I make it welcoming to recent immigrants for whom no one can vouch?

A web of trust is a wonderful tool, but it's exclusive by design. This is a problem for some communities, even though it makes others much better.

Which is, funnily (?) enough, how a lot of IRL organizations used to be. And basically don't be of the wrong ethnicity or religion.

It still happens more informally today, of course, but it used to be a pretty (if un-spoken) part of how a lot of WASPy organizations operated to a greater or lesser degree.

Tell your TPM who you are and prove it with face and fingerprint ID that get matched to a real old person.

Leave them on the device, authorize the device to validate before age inappropriate content appears.

Website wants to know your age? Your face and fingerprint support your attestation signed by a trusted party.

Can it be tricked potentially? Sure, but then you’re probably a super genius kid and not the reason that these laws were created (as if).

Don’t let anyone tell you anonymity must die for safety to exist.

EU's ZKP implementation provides complete anonymity and untrackability:

https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr...

> It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

The problem here is that the premise is the error. "Prove your ID" is the thing to be prevented. It's the privacy invasion. What people actually want are a disjoint set of only marginally related things:

1) They want a way to rate limit something. IDs do this poorly anyway; everyone has one so anyone so criminal organizations with a botnet just compromise the IDs of innocent people -- and then the innocent are the ones who get banned. The best way to do this one would be to have an anonymous way for ordinary people to pay a nominal fee. A $5 one-time fee to create an account is nothing to most ordinary people but a major expense to spammers who have 10,000 of their accounts banned every day. The ugly hack for not having this is proof of work, which kinda sorta works but not as well, and then you're back to botnets being useful because $50,000/day in losses is cash money to the attacker that in turn funds the service's anti-spam team, but burning up some compromised victim's electricity is at best the opportunity cost of not mining cryptocurrency or similar, which isn't nearly as much. It would be great to solve this one (properly anonymous easy to use small payments) but the state of the law is a significant impediment so you either need to get some reform through there or come up with a creative way to do it under the existing rules.

2) You want to know if someone is e.g. over 18. This is the one where people keep pointing back to government IDs, but you only need one piece of information for this. You don't need their name, their picture, you don't even need their exact birthdate. Since people get older over time rather than younger, all you need to know is whether they've ever been over 18, since in that case they always will be. Which means you can just issue an "over 18" digital signature -- the same signature, so it's provably impossible to tie it to a specific person -- and give a copy to anyone who is over 18. Maybe you change the signature e.g. once a day and unconditionally (whether they require it that day or not) email all the adults a new copy, but again they all get the same indistinguishable current signature. Then there are no timing attacks because the new signature comes to everyone as an unconditional push and is waiting for them in their inbox rather than something where the request coincides with the time you want to use it for something, but kids only have it if an adult is giving it to them every day. The latter is true for basically any age verification system -- if an adult with an ID wants to lend it to you then you can get in.

3) You want to know if the person accessing some account is the same person who created it or is otherwise authorized to use it. This is the traditional use of IDs, e.g. you go to the bank and want to withdraw some cash so you need a bank card or government ID to prove you're the account holder. But this is the problem which is already long-solved on the internet. The user has a username and password, TOTP, etc. and then the service can tell if they're authorized to use the account. It's why you don't need government ID on the internet -- user accounts do the thing it used to do only they don't force you to tie all your accounts together against a single name, which is a feature. The only people who want to prevent this are the surveillance apparatchiks who are trying to take that feature away.

I'd be interested in working on a problem like that.

I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity

I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity

I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though.

I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though

In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?

I guess it would have to be something like a service which confirms whether a person already has an account on the site but doesn’t have to track which particular account it is.

I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.

That is effectively impossible though. There's data centers of stripped down phones, so "it's actually a phone" doesn't do it.

What's stoping bots to verify identity? This will not work, especially with frequent data breaches.

this eye thing will never work. people in general are realizing the last people we should trust with our personal stuff are tech bro billionaires. they’ve broken trust too many times.

even worse many of them are just plain vocal about their disdain for people in general.

at least from what i’m seeing, people are starting to walk away from online at an increasing rate so i definitely don’t see widespread adoption of his creepy eye thing.

I’m imagining like, a physical place you would go and get your text spoken out of your personal speaker directly into someone else’s microphones.

LLMs can curse without issue

Who doesn't love capybaras?

Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.

To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.

I interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.

The problem is that it has become very popular to ban people from a sub based on what other subs they post to. It was turning Reddit into a two-party universe.

The better fix would be to make the support for multiple accounts in the reddit app not so incredibly-shitty, where you're basically logging out and logging back in. Instead, just tell it "posts to this sub use this account, posts to that sub use that account", etc.

I enabled hiding my posts because I kept getting harrassed and even doxxed.

Wait isn't that every sub? /s

That's definitely the most insidious use, but I think the larger portion is advertisers and karma farmers (who later sell to advertisers).

AI is particularly bad at this, and regimes that employ tactics generally are not short of labour to have humans to do it.

If AI is being used in these areas it is less as an attempt to manipulate as it is to just create noise and engender distrust in what they hear.

There are certain topics that seem to get instantly flag-killed unusually often. IPv6 is one.

I think the real explanation is simpler - it's just not particularly interesting to the authorities. No need for conspiracy theories.

As to compromising material for bribery, that can be collected in so many different ways, and things like email or messaging or tiktok videos are probably far more interesting, reddit is not particularly useful for that.

I'd argue that Reddit leadership, which insulted, hobbled, and wrote off its mods and power users (destroying projects like /r/BotDefense) while doing little to crack down on the proliferation of bot repost content, had a major role in encouraging this. They might even like it better this way -- lots of extra fake engagement boosting traffic stats without messy human drama, which they can then ironically sell back to AI labs as training data.

They directly contributed to the problem that they say forced them to leave Reddit.

Do you sincerely believe that that's how grey-area's comment was meant to be read?

Discord is far better for discussion than IRC. You can be much more expressive on discord, instantly jump into a call and screenshare, easily link people to other rooms, tag, import bots etc. IRC kinda sucks compared to modern chat and they refuse to implement features that are considered basic.

I'm more sad about how the UI of it all is just clunky. Even though it resembles ye olde IRC clients like mIRC, nowhere near readable for some reason.

are those attributes now assets?

I got banned the other day from the Stellaris Discord server because someone accused me of hacking Roblox accounts. I’ve never played Roblox in my life. So that’s nice.

This shit will come to Discord too.

discord is a tool for hosting private chat servers. it's pretty neutral. the UI is not great for building a shared knowledge base, although people do that anyway

but yes the publicly accessible servers are going to face similar problems. the socially competent people tend not to run those servers, and have smaller private servers with people they know as they have no drive to try to create a space for strangers to gather.

i predominantly use it for real time chatting, its a big group text chat and a place to hop in a voice channel and shoot the shit while doing whatever we want on the computer a la ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak

but yes i also game and it gets a lot of use for that as well

i agree though that for collecting and organizing information longer term like forums do, it is not ideal

You are booming out. I cant believe suggesting a mailing list

> I don't understand why it's the default.

Because it equally well supports real-time communication.

And it looks shiny.

And some people use it to e.g. watch a video together, or other social purposes.

There’s no rule against submitting LLM-written—ahem, “cleaned up my notes”—articles, just comments.

It's specifically against the guidelines to keep registering new accounts, and this is a good reason why. We have to have ways of determining credibility and authenticity, now more than ever, and a track record of good posting is one of the best ways to do that. We are drowning with spam and low-quality posts/projects posted from brand new accounts. If it's a well-researched, high-quality post, of course we want to give it exposure. We just have to be realistic about what we're up against.

Why do you think those comments are accurate? Maybe those comments are by LLMs? If you believe crowd wisdom on its face, you will have big problems with LLMs.

It used to be super common that when you spotted a bot post and clicked through to the user's history, you'd see very average, human-looking activity from years ago, followed by a long gap of inactivity, and then a flurry of obvious bot comments.

It's very obvious that these accounts were abandoned and then either bought from their original owners, or more likely bought from someone who compromised them, because of their history and karma.

And I would bet money that Reddit is well aware of this phenomenon, because not long after it became so common as to be impossible to ignore, they papered over it by allowing users to hide their history from public view. (AFAIK subreddit moderators can still see it, but typical users now have much less ability to see whether they're interacting with actual humans.)

I recently spotted one unmistakable example of this[0]. It’s been a trick for many years now that duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human but this was quite the example.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-06/Is_The_Inter...

So what is the comment frequency of these bots? There must be some signal in the activity even if the comments themselves pass the turing test.

As long as you're not sharing the things you're watching with a loudspeaker. And that's really not a given among commuters.

I'm surprised these platforms don't have advanced heuristics to detect API calls and inauthentic traffic.

Did you clone the Reddit API from browser traffic and then turn it into a 100% API driven thing?

I'd imagine they'd be sniffing browser agents, plugins, cookies, etc. to fingerprint. Using JavaScript scroll position, browsing rate and patterns, etc.

Maybe their protections just aren't that sophisticated.

Can’t make it worse than Huffman already has. After the API nonsense most mods who are still there should’ve left. I don’t know how most continue to do Reddit’s work for free after the way Huffman talked about us all. He made it clear how much he despises the community and the complete lack of respect he has for the people who run all the subs (I helped moderate a medium-sized sub and I miss it but don’t regret leaving at all)

[flagged]

the suits or suit minded people have realised that HN is good for advertising to the kind of demographic that'll give them free labour and is easily swayed by whatever the latest trend is

People still see HN as a valuable place for promoting their businesses. Usually some poorly thought out SaaS.

If you look at what people outside HN talk about HN, it's not uncommon to see wannabe tech entrepreneurs talking about how to promote their products via Show HNs and how to stay HN front page. It's honestly a little sad considering that HN has a tendency to rip these projects apart.

Why would reddit bots exist? (In)organic advertising, same concept here.

The ones you see flagged are the very obvious bots. What about the more sophisticated ones? How do I know skupig isn't a bot?

Possibly to test reactions to a bot they plan to build a startup around.

I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems.

Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.

I didn’t say that people weren’t doing it. I was asking this person not to do that here since it sort of sounds like they have plans to

Having to turn on showdead (which I have turned on by default) demonstrates that’s it’s not much of a problem in practice.

I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.

For what it's worth the admins here have let the tone of conversation slip a little when it comes to AI, as in there are many people who now openly mock (and worse) the AI zealots and there's no admin coming in and "saving" the metaphorical day anymore. In the not so distant past that kind of behaviour was almost instantly reprimanded, kindergarten-style.

> Would you enjoy the experience of telling your LLM “make a HN-style comment thread on $subject with 200 comments, no trolls please”

The reason I'm not simulating the experience with an LLM is because:

1. It costs more time to do so, because I have to prompt it to create a single comment. Multiply that by the typical number of an HN thread.

2. I suppose in a way you need bad takes to form your own view of a topic or an issue. LLMs would also be unable to provide truly unique experiences, such as some of the veterans who sometimes post here who were part of the living computing history as we know it.

> I’m surprised you’re here and not just simulating the experience with your LLM by yourself.

That's something you imagined that I claimed I want. If you read my comment again, you'll see there was no such thing.

> We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.

Maybe you are. I like getting to a reasonably correct model of a topic or issue. Bad human takes can still be useful here. I just get inevitably tired of the people crying about potential LLM comments all the time.

> Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here?

Obviously we're not there yet, regardless of what I want. But there is a great number of HN threads posted here that touch on topics that have been discussed so many countless times, that an average LLM summary would do better than most comments.

LLMs are not good at writing. If they were we would have entire libraries of new, amazing literature.

The main thing I suspect of being LLM written is the sort of LinkedIn style: very short sentences, overly focused on sort of… making an impact on the user. But that’s also how a certain type of bad human writer writes. So in the end, I’m not sure I know if anything in particular was written by an LLM.

I guess… “that’s not just an AI red flag, it’s generally shit prose” would be how ChatGPT would describe most things nowadays.

A mere opinion is not mental illness.