HACKER Q&A
📣 eimrine

Why HN is the only website that allows throwaway accounts?


Or rather, why absolutely every other website forbids doing this?

Why everything is trying to verify my mail/phone nowadays?


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
There are many things that make HN easy to moderate compared to others.

It is not that big. When I’ve gotten out of line I’ve heard from dang personally.

It doesn’t take pictures, which eliminates a range of trouble from stupid image memes to child pornography.

It doesn’t have advertising. If you have advertising you have to worry about 1-in-10,000 and rarer events such beheading videos (caused a crisis for Youtube), dead nazis (caused a crisis for my site), etc.

Dang has automated assistance that you probably don’t see. I trained a model to predict if posts were flagged and found it was shockingly accurate because there already is a model that nukes spam posts so fast you never see them and my model learned to do what that model does.


👤 mtmail
(Human, manual) moderation doesn't scale. HN has just enough automatic algorithmic blocks and users flagging incoming spam. It has drawbacks, for example missing good content because the number of submissions can be higher than users watching the /new queue, example from an hour ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35008506