Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money?

rrandyrand about 8 hours ago 21 comments

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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.

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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

gucci-on-fleek•about 6 hours ago

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.

joshribakoff•about 5 hours ago

No the magic was the community’s ability to weed out garbage so we can have meaningful conversations. Garbage is garbage no matter who wrote it.

randyrand•about 5 hours ago

definitely. signal to noise on HN has always been incredibly higher than most other platforms.

MostlyFragile•about 5 hours ago

I don’t think ‘difficulty getting an account’ == ‘mutual respect’. I think you can make the hoops tougher without sacrificing the culture. Though I’m not sure how best that would happen.

bttfuchsia•about 4 hours ago

I love seeing HNers ignore Reddit like there’s something special about HN. It’s an in group and out group like everywhere else folks. We’ve gone through this before with Digg as well just at a larger scale.

chistev•about 7 hours ago

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

Great idea.

pixel_popping•about 7 hours ago

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•about 6 hours ago

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.

verve_rat•about 5 hours ago

Maybe, if you're to ashamed to risk your real name being linked to something you say, you shouldn't say it?

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?

sdwr•about 6 hours ago

[flagged]

randyrand•about 6 hours ago

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.

sdevonoes•about 6 hours ago

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

ChoGGi•about 5 hours ago

You could always join Kuro5hin it's only a one time payment.

ipaddr•about 5 hours ago

Why wouldn't bots pay?

randyrand•about 5 hours ago

Some would! But it changes the value proposition significantly. That's why it needs to be a reasonably high amount.

fuzzfactor•about 5 hours ago

Exactly. Plenty of them can probably afford it easier than averge people.

late_night_fix•about 7 hours ago

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.

thegrim33•about 4 hours ago

I analyzed multiple months of submissions for rule breaking / political content and the vast, vast, majority of them came from the same ten or so 50-200k upvotes power user accounts. The most "trusted" accounts on this site are the worst offenders.

dang•14 minutes ago

That doesn't sound accurate to me. I'd like to see links to this.

bttfuchsia•about 4 hours ago

But if you say anything against it, you get downvoted and dang reminds you to read the guidelines which are intentionally vague and are misused all the time for vendettas. It’s a rigged system to start with.

plytow•about 4 hours ago

There are some users that 100% are protected by mods.

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.

dang•14 minutes ago

You guys may have unrealistic expectations. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.

If you're asking for something humanly impossible, remember that there are only 2 of us.

pjc50•about 5 hours ago

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.

randyrand•about 8 hours ago

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

ButlerianJihad•about 6 hours ago

But that is the cost for an old account!

dude250711•about 6 hours ago

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

Kim_Bruning•about 5 hours ago

Are we going all voight-kampf with this? Or something non-fictional?

Either way, you might be surprised to find in 2026 that it'd filter out more humans than agents; depending ;-)

sovenyr•about 7 hours ago

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