Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money? I love HN and I don’t want to see it die. But bot accounts are growing everyday. Something more radical needs to be done. |
Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money? I love HN and I don’t want to see it die. But bot accounts are growing everyday. Something more radical needs to be done. |
We're doing lots of things about bots and are actively working on this. I'd like to see links to what you (or anyone) are specifically worried about.
I agree that the bot accounts are annoying and getting worse, but I don't think that making it more difficult to create an account is a good solution here.
HN is also different from Reddit/Digg because it only allows text and links, but this is the same as Usenet and most old-school forums. And then there are some intangible cultural differences, but every platform thinks that they're special, so there's nothing really unique here.
Great idea.
1. This account, an account where I'm fully myself, honest and is a pseudonym as to who I really am. I do not want this to be linked to my actual real identity but if it happens to be linked to my real identity, it's fine. Well... fine-ish... fine enough anyway.
That leads me to account type 2.
2. Some takes I have are simply too spicy. I know this, but I still have those takes [1]. In very rare situations, I find it important to share these takes as they are actually relevant. For this, I either create a throwaway account or access whatever throwaway account is available because my browser auto logs in on them (certain browsers I use so little that my throwaway account auto logs in on it).
But then we have the flipside of this, which is account type 3.
3. An account with a username that is actually traceable to me if you know how to search. On this account I am still myself, but I do ask myself if my take is a "clean take" that under any circumstance or reality is still a nice clean take. I don't put anything on here that is even remotely controversial.
[1] Here's a simple "spicy take" that I daresay on this account, so the actual spicy takes I have are a little more wild than this. Here it is: in 10 years from now we'll have so much cybersex you can't even fathom it. We'll have 3D models that will look almost indistinguishable, those 3D models will be more intelligent than you are on many things. You get the idea, a spicy take.
Paying money for something valuable is not punishment. HN is easily worth the money to me.
Users will get threatened and scolded for getting mildly confrontational on a tech topic, but plenty of user can flamebait endlessly in political threads unimpeded.
Either way, you might be surprised to find in 2026 that it'd filter out more humans than agents; depending ;-)
Physical places have the constraint that you and I cannot be in the same place because we exclude each other. Our groups cannot be in the same place because two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time. Virtual places allow overlap. We should lean into that advantage with virtual communities and provide a means for people to share the space while speaking within their own contexts. Rather than requiring total community norms match our preferences, we have the ability to enforce our preferences for ourselves.
Ideally, I'd like Hacker News to come up with a block functionality and some way to turn on in-network commentary only, but until such a feature arrives I've made a trivial Chrome extension that hides people's comments and allows hiding green comments by default: https://overmod.org/
Perhaps this is unavoidable. In the end maybe somewhere has to be slightly "underground" to be good, lest the bots trampling the surface like the opening scenes of Terminator find you.
How would be possible to avoid frauds?
Maybe AI would be solution. Feed it all bank statements, private records, emails, tax records and so on from say past 10 years. Then it can come up with correct figure...
Yet, it's possible to create a new account and get un-shadow-banned after a few hours. Dunno if this speaks volumes about how great HN's mods are or if it just means that other forums a really lacking in moderation for one reason or another (like "we have shitposts but it drives up engagement").
The trouble is that HN is centralized, like most forums. So what if it stops working the way it does now? There are likely many forums like HN with good algorithms and mods, but we won't all move to the same one, we'll scatter around. There isn't even a competing HN; lobsters is for narrower subjects, reddit is trash, what else is there?
If you're asking for something humanly impossible, remember that there are only 2 of us.
job 2
flagged 204
dead 336
story 1664
delayed 687
comment 12312
Not humanly possible for two moderators to view and make judgement on even a small fraction of these comments.
No every opinion needs to be heard, not every thought needs sharing. If you are embarrassed by what you type, then why do you think other people need to read it?
He retaliated by baselessly accusing the actual heroes (who were risking their lives) of a terrible crime. Refused to back down, refused to apologize, said “if it’s not true sue me” got sued, hid behind his lawyers (his defense was “I didn’t actually say his name) “). Yeah that guy and guys like him can’t handle criticism and have the wealth and power to retaliate.
An honest discussion space utilizes anonymity to shield normal people from retaliation by sensitive man-child retribution. I’m not embarrassed to say it, it needs to be said. It needs to be heard.
Now, if you make a waiting period or whatever, then that becomes impossible unless you had the foresight to create a throwaway two weeks ago (or whatever time frame).
The AI techno-luddite crowd is an example that comes to mind.
For the meantime, I use forbearance. But it is a shame that one cannot steer conversations in interesting directions because of the tyranny (such as it is) of the few . I rather like the idea of a sacrificial account, to be honest.