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Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for somet
by laborcontract 6mo ago
Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.
- rock_artist 6mo agoI really don’t like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work makes sense more than limiting new users.
- trinsic2 6mo agoWhat would this proof of work scenario, instead of restricting new user content, look like?
- TZubiri 6mo agoSeems to be a general problem right? The standard solution is using an email to register account, maybe a cloudflare captcha, and then using good network logging to group accounts by IPs and chainbanning abusive accounts when they are caught by other mechanisms.
- magicalhippo 6mo agoThe problem is that we might lose some gold. Not too seldom have I seen the author or a significant party of a story chime in through a fresh green account, as they were alerted by the story being posted here one way or another. And usually when they do it's very interesting. As such I would find it detrimental if they had to jump through too many hoops so they don't bother or it takes too long so the thread dies before they can participate.
- gmerc 6mo agothe death of the press should give you all the answers you need on this one.
- Uvix 6mo agoSeems like restricting posts but not comments from a fresh account would thread that needle pretty well?
- ThrowawayR2 6mo agoIf that were to happen, I'd also suggest that comments from fresh accounts should also have URLs deleted or disabled.
- Barbing 6mo agoEven 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.
- johnnyanmac 6mo agoI'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.
- Barbing 6mo agoTrue Mm, balancing against “long-time lurker, made an account just to post this”…
- AnimalMuppet 6mo agoYeah, 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.)
- SoftTalker 6mo agoI'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.
- trinsic2 6mo agoI think the right people will stick around. There is a certain kind of indivudal that has the paitence to understand that a system that restricts new accounts from post is a good thing. Of recent, there have been a lot of posters that come here from the open web just to try and slant opinion.
- wizzwizz4 6mo agoI am only that kind of individual when I'm inclined to post unconstructively – not that I know that, at the time. When I'm feeling constructive, friction is likely to make me take my constructive energies elsewhere.
- brudgers 6mo agoI believe HN's success is in large part not presuming to have a good idea of what "the right people" are. This doesn't mean it doesn't have a strong sense of what bad behavior is. It clearly does.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 6mo agoThe SA Forums model does accomplish the goals of filtering out noise, but then you’re stuck with a stagnant community of “the right people.”
- bombcar 6mo agoUnironically slashdot's moderating and meta-moderating is the best long-term system I've seen. Everything else seems to eventually cause new blood to dry up.
- jtchang 6mo agoI remember reading slashdot but what is their system? Is there a separate set of mods that moderate the moderators?
- moralestapia 6mo agoTotally. I don't think the solution is changing the dynamic but flagging, this site self-moderates quite well, aside from dang and tomhow's great work.
- hinkley 6mo agoResponding from a new account is different from posting from a new account. You aren’t vetting people by making accounts have a minimum age to post articles. That’ll just cause people to make accounts before they need them. Reddit has forums where you need a minimum karma to post to certain subreddits and that is typically upvotes on your comments, but it could also be upvotes on someone else’s moderated subreddit.
- grapheneposter 6mo agoYes that is exactly what I just did, some of us are just getting around to having time to post
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 6mo agoHonest question, what are the alternatives to HN? Because if new account restrictions create enough friction, you lose legitimate users who periodically rotate accounts for privacy reasons. At some point the annoyance tips toward just lurking, and a forum where only old accounts talk is a stagnant forum given enough time.
- alwa 6mo agoLobste.rs comes to mind. High enough friction that, even as a seasoned participant here, I haven’t tried over there yet.
- esperent 6mo agoI've wanted to join lobste.rs for several years but don't see any way to do so. I think that might be a bit too far in the other direction.
- mastazi 6mo agoSame here, I don't know anyone who might send me an invite unfortunately. It's unlikely for this topic to come up organically in a conversation as in "hey by the way are you on lobste.rs" so my previous attempts were by sending messages in my company's notice board asking if someone is there. But in the last few years I have worked in smaller startups so the sample size is too small for this strategy to succeed.
- ajdecon 6mo agoFWIW, folks on lobste.rs are (mostly) friendly and willing to extend invites if you seem like a real person. My understanding is that the invite system is primarily in use to avoid drive-by spammers and the like. Feel free to send me an email (findable via my HN profile) mentioning that you found it via this thread, and I’m happy to extend an invite.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dang 6mo agoIndeed. Here is a recent litmus test: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852. How can we filter the lightweight stuff while still benefiting from posts like these? (a bit more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384, with a reply from the OP)
- Terretta 6mo agoInteresting litmus test, as the post isn't just green, it's riddled with LLM copyediting. Doesn't read as if originally composed by an LLM, so there's that. Would seem to require some discernment to classify. Not all assistive use is slop.
- dang 6mo agoI mean I guess you're right - I didn't notice it, because the community reaction to the project was so positive. > Not all assistive use is slop. That's right, and the key is to discern which posts/projects are interesting.
- thinkingemote 6mo agoThe discussion about the LLM assisted/written submission at the time, with replies by the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055300 The defence given was essentially "just reformatted it for better grammar" It's obviously says LLM to me at first read through. I suspect that: a) less people are willing to expend a bit of energy to notice LLM usage given how much of it is. ("we've lost" theory) b) that people are losing the ability to detect LLM submissions. ("we're cooked" theory) or c) that people don't care about the use of LLM. ("who cares" theory). Personally I've been feeling less invested, because it seems as if most users don't care and even the main users of the site don't notice it.
- trinsic2 6mo agoDo you have any good links to guides on how to spot? I would like to care, but its hard to tell. and then what do we do when we spot it?
- vova_hn2 6mo agoThis problem can be solved by an invite/vouch for system. New account can be invited or vouched for by an old account with good karma. If an account that you vouched for starts spamming and/or slopposting, you lose your vouching for abilities for a period of time or forever.
- throwaway2037 6mo agoI didn't know anybody here before I joined. (I have been here for a few years, and I still don't know anybody here.) How would a person like me get invited or vouched?
- vova_hn2 6mo agoAsk you IRL friends or colleagues from your job "hey, do you happen to have an HN account?" If the discussion is related to a public project, like in the examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303604 ...you can use existing communication channels (website, readme on github) to ask people for an invite to participate in it.
- throwaway2037 6mo agoI am pretty sure that none of my friends nor co-workers read HN. Whenever I have shared stuff, none of them have heard of HN.
- kristopolous 6mo agoI think we've gone from the eternal September to the eternal December
- intended 6mo agoThese changes aren’t being suggested in a vacuum. It’s perhaps unintentional, but your framing makes it seem that this is a baseless whimsy. At this point, it appears that we will be talking to bots more than humans. It’s a brave new world, and not adapting to it will see the humans leave.
- dwedge 6mo agoHeh until this moment I thought green was a respected account somehow - like moderators on Reddit
- HendrikHensen 6mo agoI rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.
- oofbey 6mo agoI think yours might be extreme. But I think the anonymity here is widely appreciated. And frankly necessarily relies on easy creation of accounts. People share things that they often wouldn’t. And somehow the culture remains mostly civil. It’s a pretty fantastic forum IMHO. Changing the rules would surely change the vibe, so to speak.
- imglorp 6mo agoI appreciate the anonymity. Posting as throwaway is often useful to distance the poster from $work or $ex or other situations yet contribute to a conversation. But will it continue under all the login id surveillance laws coming up?
- srid 6mo ago> not too much of my post history accumulates in one account I'm curious to hear what benefits you think can be gained from avoiding this.
- idontwantthis 6mo agoI do it sometimes just to restrict my own pride in the account. I get a buzz from upvotes and that upsets me on a deeper level.
- bitroughj 6mo agoSame, but also for the opposite reason: a new account gives me a chance to do better. If I post lame comments, I accept the lameness of the posts attached to a particular user name and the hesitation I feel to post more lame comments decreases. With a fresh identity, I am more likely to avoid lame posting sort of like how you avoid going out in the mud in brand new sneakers. A sort of repentance; being born again in the digital realm.
- whh 6mo agoI echo this sentiment for all social media platforms today... At least new accounts are more obvious here. This pattern has been increasingly used for scams, spam and AI slop on Instagram, X and Facebook for years.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 6mo agoI was going to suggest emotional leetcode, but LLMs do well on this. When given a conversation about Alice and Suzy having a one-upmanship conversation (my husband rich, my kid is a genius) and what emotions they are feeling, and what Suzy could have said instead to improve the conversation, it gave accurate responses (e.g. they're feeling insecure, competitive, envy).
- II2II 6mo agoThat type of question could also turn people off. We already have too many discussions where people are quick to jump to conclusions and attribute intent, rather than asking basic questions.
- brudgers 6mo agoMy intuition is increasing the difficulty of account creation favors motivated actors and disincentivizes organic participation because: 1. ideological and/or economically motivated actors will just see it as a cost of doing business. 2. Ordinary sign-up friction is more likely to make HN appear ordinary to anyone who stumbles upon it. 3. Sign-up friction is a moat. The strength of HN is moderation of what gets in.
- ls-a 6mo agoWow! I might be witnessing the end of HN
- knowitnone3 6mo ago[dead]
- beautron 6mo agoPerhaps more proof of work is necessary, but it makes me sad. I still remember creating my HN account. It stands out in my memory, because it was the smoothest, simplest, easiest, and quickest account creation of my life. I had lurked here for around a decade before finally creating an account. Any urge to participate was thwarted by my resistance toward creating accounts (I just hate account creation for some reason). But HN's account creation process was a breath of fresh air. "You mean it can be this easy? Why isn't it this easy everywhere? If I had known how simple it was, I would have created an HN account years earlier, lol." It was especially stunning to me, because I think the discourse on HN is generally of a higher quality than most other sites (which I wouldn't naturally associate with such an easy account creation process). It's my only fond memory of account creation (along with maybe when I created an account on America-Online back in the 90s, since that was my first ever account and it was all so novel). Just a few quick seconds, and then I'm already commenting on HN. It was beautiful. I remain delighted.
- Vachyas 6mo agoSomehow I've been browsing HN since ~2019 without ever wanting to reply so much that I was willing to make an account (and start receiving emails, etc) but your comment made me curious how easy it could be, and wow. Now I have an account. I kind of assumed it was hard to make an account (maybe even an invite-only situation) based purely off of how unique most handles were, and how well curated/moderated everything was. So I guess you could say, the quality of the usernames and the quality of the posts :)
- nottorp 6mo agoBut is there a connection between the front page being full of "AI" slop and "AI" worship and these new accounts? Or are the old timers also upvoting those submissions in the detriment of other, more interesting topics?