Part of the magic of HN is that it's open to everyone, and everyone is treated equally. I'm not aware of anywhere else on the internet where a farmer from a poor country, a college student, and a CEO of a billion-dollar company can have a meaningful conversation, and I think that it would be a real shame to lose that.

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.

90% of the stories on HN are AI related. It’s normal to have so many bots nowadays. If HN dies, wouldn’t be the worst thing tbh

So punish real users who just discovered HN, or old lurkers who finally decide to join?

Great idea.

• pixel_popping

  today at 10:57 AM

  Also, most users (actually everyone I know personally) have multiple HN accounts which is natural for an anonymous platform, so it's not abnormal for long-term users to remake accounts regularly. I believe most of us don't access their oldest account (probably due to post history, beliefs that have changed...)

  • mettamage

    today at 12:01 PM

    Yea, I have 3 type of accounts (and the HN mods know this and they tell me I'm not the only one).

    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.

    • sdwr

      today at 12:30 PM

      Anyone who still says "spicy take" is incapable of having a surprising or incendiary opinion

      • pixel_popping

        today at 12:54 PM

        but we will have so much cybersex, you can't even fathom it.

• randyrand

  today at 11:55 AM

  I'm all ears if you have a better idea.

  Paying money for something valuable is not punishment. HN is easily worth the money to me.

Metafilter charged $5. Of course, putting a barrier to entry is also more likely to make a site die.

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.

Instead of banning and charging,HN could double down on trust signal,like device reputation,posting velocity limits,and stronger weighting of upvotes from long standing accounts.

I would not call LLM users outright "bots"... That being said, perhaps some captcha requiring human empathy could weed them out?

Personally, I think new accounts should cost $300. It’s not a perfect solution, clearly. But it should hopefully reduce the floodgates.

• ButlerianJihad

  today at 12:10 PM

  But that is the cost for an old account!

it should be better bot detection system - especially because of ai generated comments - and that's all

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