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

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

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

Great idea.

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

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.

Its the same Claw Agent garbage funded by YC

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.

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

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

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.

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

Why wouldn't bots pay?

I wonder what would reasonable level be. Say 1% of gross income or gross wealth. Whichever is higher. That would equalise the burden. So rich people who can afford it can pay more and poor people still pay, but might struggle a bit.

Every group has always claimed that Eternal September has come right after them. It happens in San Francisco and New York City. It happens on Digg, and Reddit, and Hacker News. It only doesn't happen on Lobste.rs because it's too small. I think the reality of most social networks is that communities shift and change over time.

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/

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If the problem is bots ban bots.

From my own experience, I can confirm that new users currently can’t just post (or at least I couldn’t). So I’d appreciate it if there were some way to prove you’re not a bot and that you have at least a genuine question or perhaps an interesting post.

HN would die without new users, so that's not an option!

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.