HACKER Q&A
📣 l33tbro

Should there be a temporary ban on new accounts?


Something something AI and quality of this forum.

I'm not arguing this is a good solution. But our user experience is being increasingly disrupted by squinting at comments and trying to parse their syntactic and semantic structure to discern if this account is a person or not. That is no what this place should be, and I think that is something we all agree on.

A new account ban sounds rash and I agree that this could be a really dumb idea. I'm also certain dang et al will have considered it amongst other approaches. But this place is becoming less compelling by the day, and at least this measure plugs the holes until there is a strategy in place to address the issue of bots and agents being able to create accounts and spam and shill the ever-living fuck out of this once great site.

Why even is there an urgency for new users? Especially given that many now are guaranteed to be undetectable bots, which goes against the ethos of the site. What is the argument against pausing new accounts, when this community is already fairly large and active?

  👤 rkorlimarla Accepted Answer ✓
I think this sort of gatekeeping while understandable, really limits new users that have just learnt about this forum and wanted to accomplish the thing they were here for a reason - case and point - myself - just got here - want to post something on showHN.. and was blocked. Forced engagement through strict gatekeeping
👤 Eaglo
Not a terrible idea, but what's the exit plan? "Eventually someone will code something to stop them"?
👤 bedroom_jabroni
Hey, I just signed up. Give me some time and the thought of chatting to an LLM will become more appealing.

What was that new benchmark recently that no LLM could pass? Pull it up, wrap into a captcha service, apply for a YC funding round.

👤 krapp
The argument against it is that it's futile. Banning new accounts will lead to stagnation and stop bot accounts but people will simply filter their own comments through an LLM, either to avoid steganography or to maximize their compliance with the guidelines and potential karma. Eventually they'll just have an agent comment for them because that's the best way to maximize their utility of the forum. All of the posted articles will either be written by AI or will be about AI. All Show HNs will be vibe coded. This will happen because it's what an increasing number of people on HN want to normalize.

The fact is the ethos of this forum has become antithetical to what hacker culture and tech have become, which is incurious, misanthropic and aggressively pro AI. That isn't a problem that can be solved with engineering, it's existential. Either the culture changes or HN does, and as HN's whole thing is "avoiding the Eternal September at all costs," which reduces to "avoiding cultural change at all cost," HN can't change and survive. Immovable object versus irresistable force.

I guess the only advice I have is to stop using HN whenever it becomes useless to you and find greener pastures. The Fediverse is still good.

👤 scoofy
I actually really like the NextDoor solution. Want an account? Cool, it'll cost you the price of a postcard to your location. When you receive it, you can open your account. More than 10 accounts at your residence? Hrmm... looks like you're up to no good.

I'd be happy to pay the 61ยข per account it currently costs to mail a postcard if it means a massive improvement in anti-bot bs.

👤 brudgers
[delayed]
👤 ammmir
you know how we have the showdead? how about adding a couple of new ones:

hidekarma: hide accounts below certain karma threshold

hideage: hide accounts newer than 1 week/1 month/6 months

these should be opt-in. people that care can turn them on.