Ask HN: Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money?
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rrandyrand about 8 hours ago 48 comments
ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
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.
Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
We're doing lots of things about bots and are actively working on this. I'd like to see links to what you (or anyone) are specifically worried about.
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.
Great idea.
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.
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?
Paying money for something valuable is not punishment. HN is easily worth the money to me.
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.
If you're asking for something humanly impossible, remember that there are only 2 of us.
Physical places have the constraint that you and I cannot be in the same place because we exclude each other. Our groups cannot be in the same place because two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time. Virtual places allow overlap. We should lean into that advantage with virtual communities and provide a means for people to share the space while speaking within their own contexts. Rather than requiring total community norms match our preferences, we have the ability to enforce our preferences for ourselves.
Ideally, I'd like Hacker News to come up with a block functionality and some way to turn on in-network commentary only, but until such a feature arrives I've made a trivial Chrome extension that hides people's comments and allows hiding green comments by default: https://overmod.org/
How would be possible to avoid frauds?
Maybe AI would be solution. Feed it all bank statements, private records, emails, tax records and so on from say past 10 years. Then it can come up with correct figure...
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.
Either way, you might be surprised to find in 2026 that it'd filter out more humans than agents; depending ;-)