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Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting

721 points by Oras ↗ HN
I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I see lots of clearly AI generated posts recently in HN and mostly coming from new accounts (green), it is more noticeable in the Show HN section.

I wish the team can either restrict new accounts from posting or at least offer a default filtering where I can only see posts from accounts with certain criteria.

I don’t want to see HN becoming twitter, which is full of bots and noise, as this would be a really sad day.

137 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread
SG-
I'm honestly surprised HN isn't used to share more malware/githubs with new accounts too.
cebert
HN does a good job moderating and blocking spam from new accounts.
saltyoldman
Amen. I think the purpose of the bots is to create high-upvoted accounts for the purpose of later flag and downvoting things they've programmed the bots to suppress.
toomuchtodo
“shownew” : “no|yes” option would be nice.
BalinKing
I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e. and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban, because I see this sort of behavior from non-green accounts as well.

EDIT: I meant (but totally forgot) to qualify that my "proposal" would only apply when the LLM-ness is self-obvious—idk, make up a "reasonable person" standard or something. Presumably, the moderators would err on the side of letting things slide. Even so, many comments I've seen are simply impossible for any reasonable person to claim as "human-written"—the default ChatGPT style is simply too distinct.

tasuki
I think your comment was generated by an LLM and hereby vote for your immediate and permanent instant ban.
rerdavies
I think all submissions to HN should be submitted via snail-mail, and must be handwritten. That would solve the problem.

/heavy sarcasm

That being said, my mother used to insist on hand-written cover letters from job applicants. Her rationale: it takes effort, so it weeds out all the applications from people who are just randomly spraying out applications for jobs they are not qualified for.

jacquesm
For now there is already a pretty effective mechanism in place, downvote and/or flag those comments that you think are across the line in that sense.

But in principle I agree with you, the rule for me is 'if it wasn't worth your time to write then it certainly isn't worth 1000x times other people's time to read'.

dmix
People accuses everything of being LLM generated these days. That'd be a tough rule to enforce.
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rpcope1
Other than this being probably challenging to enforce fairly, I think I agree that if you had strong proof of an account largely or completely posting comments/stories/whatever that was adulterated by an LLM, that is really probably ban worthy like you said.
lich_king
Many HNers strongly argue that it's absolutely impossible to distinguish between AI text and non-AI text. Some of it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to some of the occasional, one-sided stories of people who were accused of using LLMs and fired from their jobs. And some of it seems to be just hedging so that we don't develop a culture that could penalize their LLM-generated posts or code.

We had people defending the fired Ars Technica guy, even though he admitted to using an LLM in some sort of a contrived non-apology along the lines of "I did it because I had a cold".

My main problem with that is that you can just generate an infinite supply of LLM op-eds about LLMs, and is this really what we want to read every day? If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks about the risks or benefits of vibecoding, I'll just ask it.

AnimalMuppet
I think you need (at least) one exception to that rule. We have many people here whose first language is not English, and this is an English-only forum. For at least some of those people, an AI translation may give better clarity than their own attempt at writing in English.

So I would propose that, in the ideal world where we could perfectly enforce the rules that we chose, that the rule would be "AI for translation only". If it wrote your content, your comment is gone. If it translated content that you wrote, your comment is still welcome.

edanm
I disagree with this policy.

Some people can really benefit from using LLMs to help them write. E.g. non-native speakers.

LLM-assisted-writing doesn't have to be low effort, it can help people express themselves better in many cases. I'd argue that someone who spent their time doing multiple passes with an LLM to get their phrasing just write, has taken obviously more care than the majority of people on HN take before commenting.

And if you don't like the way something is written? Just down vote it. That's true whether or not it's partially/wholly written by an LLM.

tomhow
> I furthermore wish that "posting an LLM-generated comment (i.e. and passing it off as your own)" was worthy of an instant ban

It pretty much is. It’s not hard and fast (sometimes we’ll warn people or email them to ask if it’s not certain) and it takes time for us to see things and act, especially when people don’t email us when they see these comments.

But as a general rule, accounts that post generated comments get banned.

Razengan
How ironic, a comment advocating for banning LLM comments using em dashes

What if someone used an LLM to just translate?

throwaway2037
When I read comments like this, I think about the average Joe who says: "Most people are terrible drivers." Then, someone asks them: "Are you a terrible driver?" They respond: "Of course not. I am an excellent driver." A few people roll their eyes.

    > worthy of an instant ban
First, it is not always possible to identify an LLM-generated comment. There are too many false-positives. Imagine if this system was implemented, and one of your comments was identified as LLM-generated and you were instantly banned. How would you feel about it?
amadeuspagel
Let's turn HN into a place where we all grow old together until it slowly dies when we do.
dang
That's indeed the problem with restricting new users. Existing community members always want to do that, but it's a recipe for not surviving.
verdverm
This is largely the same pattern that happened during the crypto hype cycle, spam posts and complaints. It will likely subside as reality sinks in.

There are still quality submissions by new accounts and HN is good at pulling those needles from the haystack.

_alternator_
Devils advocate take: I think the quality of the ShowHN projects are in fact getting higher, at least the ones that land in the front page. The issue is that projects that used to take weeks, months, or even years of work now can be done in a weekend or so. It’s been democratizing, but it also means that when we look at these posts we (rightly) see that these new projects aren’t that much effort _with AI assistance_.

So maybe we should just be honest about this: our standards have raised. We want to see Show HN posts that require effort and dedication, that require more than a few hours of prompt flogging.

andai
I was thinking about this the other day. If someone made TempleOS today, people wouldn't be as impressed, because they'd just assume they used AI.

They'd assume this, even if they hadn't used AI, and even if AI didn't have to ability to pull it off.

monster_truck
I disagree in that the last few I can think of have involved things like services that do not really explain what they do properly and then ask for full permissions to your github account, or claim to be far more than they are (ie "I made this thing" but it's just a shim for someone else's stuff).
verdverm
I'd pose a different perspective, that Show HN in non-hype cycles tend to have a higher self-imposed bar before posting. With the democratizing, there are many posts where time from first commit to Show HN is on the order of hours, 25m being the shortest I have personally seen. I would contend that community standards have not changed meaningfully, but due to the underlying mix changing, the front page changes too.

That being said, there is an above average, low quality submissions sub-trend, that are obviously trying to plant a money tree. This is largely driven by the "look ma, no hands" Ai tools like OpenClaw, mixed (venn) with the crypto crowd looking to make easy money with near-zero effort.

With that being said, I have definitely seen some real bangers that have large Ai contributions. So I am generally in favor of minimally changing how HN works today. One small change would be adding to the Guidelines and FAQ, giving the agents something to read before posting (such that they know that automated submissions are not allowed[1])

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

zahlman
> It’s been democratizing, but it also means that when we look at these posts we (rightly) see that these new projects aren’t that much effort _with AI assistance_.

This also appears to cause a serious shift in the kind of projects that are submitted (i.e.: towards things that are much more accelerated by AI assistance).

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neom
I almost emailed dang this morning to offer to help out tho I'm not particularly technical. Few solutions I thought of: 1 - honeypot, hide some links llms can follow if stuff gets posted in it, unlikely to be a human. 2 - Make an captcha that only llms can answer, I recently made 2 social networks, one that humans couldn't join by making the submission question too difficult to figure out quickly. 3- Use an LLM to detect LLMs, the other social network I did for fun (that a small number of people use), an llm that looks for moderation issues does a good job of flagging them. 4- Invites but vary the number you have to give out by account age + karma. The first 3 seem like they'd stop some % for some time, but eventually get old.
vivid242
We need new ways to prove our humanness.
xarope
you may have a point, i.e. some mechanism to invoke a behavior that only a bot or LLM could do, that a human would not, e.g. click on this button now in a hidden div/transparent color or measure response time within page load.

the problem is that once this is found out, the circumvention is easy enough to program into bots/LLMS.

are we going to reinvent the voight-kampff test from bladerunner?!?

castral
I don't understand how this is supposed to solve anything, and I've seen it suggested as a solution multiple times. If you restrict comments to older accounts, all it's going to do is make the bot creators speculatively open and proactively age accounts for future use.
andai
Several of the posts I've seen are from autonomous AI agents, which don't currently seem to have that kind of long-term planning.
dom96
My prediction is that nothing short of human verification is going to solve this.
dang
And also invest more effort in karma farming. In other words, if we raise the bar for Show HNs we'll probably see more generated comments in the threads.
vunderba
This already happens now. Go look through a few of the "Show HN" authors - you'll inevitably see around several accounts that are 50-100 days old with a karma of 1 to avoid a green label.

The OP is talking about posts, not comments. The simplest solution might be to prevent someone from posting a "Show HN" until they’ve earned twenty-five or fifty karma, to demonstrate that they’ve been actively participating on Hacker News rather than using it solely to promote themselves.

rjh29
I don't understand why we put locks on bicycles, a determined person can just saw them off.
ThrowawayR2
I'd suggest instead a lower threshold for [dead]-ing posts and submissions by new accounts when flagged by HN users.
refulgentis
I'm honestly surprised how well it's going.

From the perspective of usually just swinging into a post from the front page, when I do see green, it's usually overtly political trolling, and dead from the start. So I had assumed new account = everyone sees your post in gray, at least for a week or two.

I don't envy the "Show HN:" case. It can be intractable, story time:

Last week, there was a "Show HN:" post for a GitHub link, made it all the way to #2. It was a Flutter app, written up as if it did all the stuff you'd want from an open source LLM client. I said to myself "geez, I knew I took too long to deliver the thing I've been working on for 2 years. the MVP version is insanely popular."

-- only after digging into the repo for 10 minutes, with domain expertise, did I realize it was a complete Potemkin village, built by Claude. And even then, I was afraid to post something pointing this out because it required domain expertise, and it could have read as negative rather than principled.

All that to say, some subsets of The AI Poster Problem now require having intimate domain expertise and 10 minutes to evaluate it. :/

Additionally, the Claude 4.6s and GPT-5.4s are better than me at posting on HN now. :/ And I've been here 16 years. The past couple days, any comment I write involving some sort of judgement or argument is by Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4, via: 1) dump HN post into prompt 2) say "I feel $X about this, write me an HN post that communicates this but not negatively".

I'm a little ashamed to admit if you look through my post history, you'll definitely see a repeated pattern over 16 years of someone who is very negative and has a hard time communicating it constructively. They're smart enough now to extrapolate observations in the way I want to, while avoiding my own tarpits.

neom
My only problem with the last part is that your tarpits are you, and personally: I want to know you, not some version of you filtered or softened by AI. That to me is what makes HN great, how...jarring the reading experience can be, it's really fun and interesting to see how people communicate their ideas - I think it's admirable that you're making an effort to become more kind and communicate more positively, but fingers cross you don't lose "your voice"! :)
Kim_Bruning
How about this: ask your LLM to review your post, "does it follow HN rules?", "how would others read it", "If I were the other person, how would I feel about this reply" , "is it convincing to you?" that sort of questions. That'll help, and it'll still be your voice.

And beware of what's already in context. Sometimes ideas that seem obvious given antecedents are not so obvious when taken in isolation.

abtinf
I really wish there was a setting whereby I could simply hide all comments from accounts less than a year old. The correlation with LLM slop is simply off the charts.

It almost feels like new accounts should be treated like new posts -- it is sort of a service that a select few are willing to undertake to upvote interesting stories early on.

I wish even more I could block specific users (there are some highly prolific, high karma users here who are extremely irritating), but that's harder and is probably best handled client side.

delichon
There is an epistemic silver lining. This is in fact a Red Queen's race that cannot be won. So in the end the only solution is to evaluate the text on its own merits without reference to the writer's status, because that status can no longer be reliably detected. For a public feed like this one, the only alternative is to ignore it. The fire hose of data will inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well only if we get better at pearl detection.
saulpw
"cannot be won" "only solution" "only alternative". sorry, no, that's too black and white. There are other solutions, even if they will only work for a couple of days/months/years.
bakugo
> So in the end the only solution is to evaluate the text on its own merits

This falls apart as soon as you realize that evaluating the text requires far more effort than generating it. If you're spending 2 minutes reading text that took 2 seconds to generate, you already lost.

dextrous
One way that I could imagine a human-only HN could evolve in the coming AI wasteland: motivated individuals join small local groups and are validated face-to-face at meet-ups. Local trusted leads gatekeep their chapter’s posts, and this scalable moderation works up the tree. Bad leaves get culled out reasonably fast, maybe there’s some controls at the top level that let you see more content “lower down the tree” if you’re ok with lower SNR. Latency to get a post widely distributed grows but I don’t see that as a massive problem.
gozucito
Agreed. Merit is the only fair solution. If OP noticed a garbage post, that means they evaluated a post on merit and decided it was garbage. So it works.

We have genAI generating videos and the quality sucks compared to human produced and filmed content. People call it out and nobody is going to watch a genAI movie at the theater or binge a genAI TV show. Merit based filtering.

GenAI for music is not as good as human-generated music either. Not a single AI song from Suno or Udio has reached the top40. Not even one. 100% of the songs are human because they are evaluated on merit.

We have SWE and agentic benchmarks to evaluate coding LLMs on merit.

Disclaimer: I am a new account.

verdverm
I'm somewhat keen to adopt ATProto's feed generators and/or labeller concepts to create an alternative /new and comment prioritizer
Aurornis
This comment uses a lot of big words but it’s full of fallacies.

The HN user base is not perfect at detecting LLM content but a lot of it does get flagged and downvoted eventually. About once a day I’ll click on a link, realize it’s AI slop, and go back to HN to flag it but discover that it’s already flagged.

If you turn on showdead you can see all of the comments from LLM bots that have been discovered and shadowbanned.

The fallacy in the comment above is simple: It’s taking the current situation and extrapolating to an extreme future, then applying the extrapolated future prediction on to the current situation. The current situation does not represent the extreme future predicted. A lot of the LLM content is easily spotted and a lot of it is a waste of time to read, therefore it’s right to police and ban it. Even if imperfect.

zahlman
The thing is, I can read something that's really terribly written and still extract useful information from it. (Suppose, for example, an LLM was directed to synthesize information from some sources that I wouldn't have thought of doing; or a submission simply makes me aware of a blind spot I had. Or I look up documentation and find something that's incredibly verbose and full of marketing-speak, but the code samples look reasonable and can be verified by testing and/or cross-reference.)
AnimalMuppet
> The fire hose of data will inevitably become ever more fecal. We can only walk away from it or be more careful about the pearls we pluck out. It ends well only if we get better at pearl detection.

I'm not sure we can. Imagine an AI that 1) creates multiple accounts, 2) spews huge numbers of comments, 3) has accounts cross-upvote, and then 4) gets enough karma on multiple accounts to get downvote privileges. That AI now controls the conversation. Anything it doesn't like, it can downvote to death.

I mean, I'm sure that HN has a "voting ring" detector, but an AI could do this on a sufficient scale to be too large to register as one cohesive group. And I think HN has a "downvote brigading" detector, but if the AI had enough different accounts, I'm not sure that would trigger, either.

The best chance to detect it is just on volume (or perhaps on too many accounts coming from the same IP address or block). But if the AI was patient, I'm not sure even that would work.

That's depressing. I don't want HN to become a bot playground, with humans crowded out. But I'm not sure we can stop it, if it was done on a large enough scale.

bmacho
Accounts have to start posting somewhen.

Moderators don't have the capacity (and fairly, it is impossible) to check if they are bots or humans.

There are no good solutions, there are hundreds of thousands of intelligences out there, trained millions of hours on how to scam humans, capable of spitting out text tirelessly and shamelessly, and there will be only more of them, tens, hundreds, thousands times more.

Kwpolska
Comments should be allowed from day one, but submissions should require some experience and karma.
dang
We're going to at least restrict Show HNs for a while.

I do think this is relevant though: "HN can't be immune from macro trends" - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

mursu
Greetings. Don't mean to come across as disrespectful. May I ask, have you decided on the criteria for new users to unlock restrictions? I apologize if it was already conveyed, but being new, I find myself a bit lost. I have read the guidelines and wanted to post in Show HN but then I got a message that stated that I do not have the clearance to do that yet. I must add I totally understand. I did not know about Hacker News until a few days ago when Gemini gave me the pointer to get my project visible to people here for real quality feedback. Again. I apologize if I am out of place.
jakejmnz
Yep, just tried to post and I'm not able. Unfortunate. :/
TheChelsUK
Please don’t forget that some AI generated posts are helpful for those of us with disabilities who can hope to keep an online presence via a pos dictated to an agent, or need help formulating sentences.

By focusing or restricting human only use you risk dehumanising those he need technological support.

plagiat0r
Unpopular opinion: Maybe the way to go is to create a separate Show HNs only for bots and put some instructions for the bots to follow, identify themselves and give them separate category. Similar to moltbook. If we can't stop it, maybe we could contain it in a dedicated space.

I'm not a fan of moltbots / openclaws (and any clones that popped up in the last moth). I don't use them and try to discourage their use. That being said, millions of them are running anyway...

jhyolm
Looking through the comments here, I don't see any information on what is required to be considered taking "some time to get to know the community and become a good contributor."
mparas
I understand that something needed to be done. Still can't help but say that it's a pity. A blanket ban on new users posting doesn't seem right. There are many people like me who "followed" HN for a long time, but then decided to create an account recently to post and ask for feedback, only to see the submission get blocked.
dang
There's no blanket ban on new users posting, and even when there's a bar, it's a low one.

I hear you that it's not great for users who are genuine HN readers but haven't posted before. I wish we had a better idea what to do for those cases!

alabhyajindal
100%. Not sure what the solution is but I have lost interest in Show HNs these days. Part of it is because when someone posted before, it usually meant they spent a fair amount of time thinking, and found it worthwhile to spend energy on the project. This was a nice first filter for bad ideas and now no longer exists.

Even for posts that are interesting to me, I get the feeling that it's not worth looking at because it was probably made using LLMs. Nothing against them, but I personally thought of Show HNs as doing something for the love of it, the end result being a bonus.

113
> I get the feeling that it's not worth looking at because it was probably made using LLMs

This is the big one for me. Small toy website someone has made as a passion project used to be the big draw of HN for me but now I just a assume it's a vibe-coded mess that'll 404 in 7 months.

neural_thing
Eventually HN is going to need to charge people $1 to post, just for spam filtering. Maybe donate the money to open source or something.
Lerc
There have been numerous stories on HN where someone directly involved with the story has created an account specifically to engage in discussion about whatever the story was about.

Losing that seems too high of a price to pay. Yes there are AI generated comments, in the past there has been script generated comments. You can report, downvote, or just ignore and move on. I am aware of posts like this existing, but I feel they are being effectively managed.

Try not to be too offended about the notion of these posts existing. Many of them are not malicious, they just caused by users stepping outside what is considered appropriate, but in a landscape where the footing is quite dynamic, everyone is making their own judgement calls in a field where the consensus is not clear, guidance seems more appropriate than punishment here.

DetroitThrow
It used to be so pleasant to read Show HN and find such interesting projects, but nowadays it's rare that any project posting their GitHub has ever read their source code or even comes close to functioning in the way the OP claims.

Such a sad development.

ohyoutravel
It’s getting really bad. New accounts hours old posting walls of AI-generated garbage comments across dozens of topics. Please restrict new posters, minimally, and perhaps add a little friction to new account sign ups.
mmaunder
That's one way to block those pesky young innovators from trampling our lawn.
regera
Resistance is futile.
bdcravens
It's not like older accounts are necessarily any better.

If you look at the leader board (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), you'll find a few old accounts that pretty much do nothing but farm links, posting sometimes dozens of times a day, with a very low percentage of comments. Their high "score" isn't an indicator of quality; they just spam enough that a few get some good upvotes, but most of their submissions are low quality.