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.
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...
Not too seldom have I seen the author or a significant party of a story chime in through a fresh green account, as they were alerted by the story being posted here one way or another. And usually when they do it's very interesting.
As such I would find it detrimental if they had to jump through too many hoops so they don't bother or it takes too long so the thread dies before they can participate.
I still remember creating my HN account. It stands out in my memory, because it was the smoothest, simplest, easiest, and quickest account creation of my life.
I had lurked here for around a decade before finally creating an account. Any urge to participate was thwarted by my resistance toward creating accounts (I just hate account creation for some reason). But HN's account creation process was a breath of fresh air. "You mean it can be this easy? Why isn't it this easy everywhere? If I had known how simple it was, I would have created an HN account years earlier, lol."
It was especially stunning to me, because I think the discourse on HN is generally of a higher quality than most other sites (which I wouldn't naturally associate with such an easy account creation process).
It's my only fond memory of account creation (along with maybe when I created an account on America-Online back in the 90s, since that was my first ever account and it was all so novel). Just a few quick seconds, and then I'm already commenting on HN. It was beautiful. I remain delighted.
1. ideological and/or economically motivated actors will just see it as a cost of doing business.
2. Ordinary sign-up friction is more likely to make HN appear ordinary to anyone who stumbles upon it.
3. Sign-up friction is a moat. The strength of HN is moderation of what gets in.
When given a conversation about Alice and Suzy having a one-upmanship conversation (my husband rich, my kid is a genius) and what emotions they are feeling, and what Suzy could have said instead to improve the conversation, it gave accurate responses (e.g. they're feeling insecure, competitive, envy).
The standard solution is using an email to register account, maybe a cloudflare captcha, and then using good network logging to group accounts by IPs and chainbanning abusive accounts when they are caught by other mechanisms.
At least new accounts are more obvious here. This pattern has been increasingly used for scams, spam and AI slop on Instagram, X and Facebook for years.
Dead Comment
By focusing or restricting human only use you risk dehumanising those he need technological support.
More here in case useful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342761
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346798
Dead Comment
What would be best is for you to poke around the site a bit and get familiar enough with it to decide if you'd like to be a part of the community or not. If so, you're welcome! you aren't the first person to feel a bit lost here as a new user, because the site is rather minimal and cryptic—but your eyes will adjust if you keep reading it over time.
If, on the other hand, you're not interested, that's totally ok, but then please don't try to promote your projects here. HN is a community, and the way to get attention for your things is to first give attention to other people's things.
I don't want to specify X, Y, Z criteria technically because that would just be an invitation to game the system. Worse, Gemini will then tell you "first do X, then do Y and Z, and then you'll get that 'real quality feedback'".
What I want Gemini to tell you (and everyone else!) is "don't use Hacker News primarily for promotion - they have a rule against that. Instead, participate in the community for the intended reason—intellectual curiosity—and after a while, it will become clear how the culture works and how to share your projects there".
My initial thought is to set up a devoted account like "sock_puppet_detector", and using the infrastructure from https://hackersmacker.org/, add any likely sock-puppets as 'foes'.
A lot of users don’t seem to realize that anyone can click on the domain in a "Show HN", and Hacker News will show you all the times that domain has been submitted. So you’ll see four or five different low karma sock puppets accounts that have all submitted the same site.
The HN culture has shifted drastically over the past 5 years.
I don't want to make HN harder for legit new users, but I do think a bit of community participation is reasonable before posting a Show HN, so it isn't just a box on some "how to promote your project" checklist.
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...
It's easy for people to game but it's at least one more effort-based hurdle.
Can't allow low-quality posting from new accounts here but thank you for listening to the concerns.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get disheartened and walk away forever.
The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days, farming karma).
The net result is that these rules ensure that much greater proportion of new accounts come from bad actors - who else would jump through hoops just to participate on a web forum?
Not to mention reddit mass removed experienced moderators when all the moderators had a protest about reddit removing their access to good third party tooling.
That's the day the site started its death spiral.
And on top of that, some of said "volunteers" are power-hungry, petty, useless fucking morons. Especially the large subreddits tend to be run by people I wouldn't trust to boil some pasta without triggering a fire alert, and yes I know people who manage that.
I still love Reddit for all its flaws though.
IMO New accounts should be restricted from creating new posts, or at least certain kinds of new posts.
Replying shouldn't be restricted. That is how users interact with each other and learn the etiquette of HN.
this is the reason I never was keen on StackOverflow etc
tried posting there several times, many times actually - every time some annoying condition was not met
well screw you too then! walked away and never bothered to contribute again
If "farming karma" is a thing, maybe that forum deserves what is coming. Either the karma mechanic is inappropriate given the demographic, or it is too hard for the users to avoid upvoting bots.
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.
I'm not opposed to AI automating away stuff no one liked doing, or even more utilitarian things in general, but robots posting on social media and discussion sites seems antithetical. I don't know what the point of talking to a robot would be when I could talk to Claude if I wanted to do that.
I'm not even 100% sure why people are doing Show HN for low-effort stuff shit that was done in 45 minutes in Claude. I guess it's trying to resume-pad or build a brand or something?
Github star farming, SEO, etc
So I guess I'm saying, the ideal rate of Show HN posts has probably gone way up. Unfortunately its also resulting in lower SNR. Not sure what to do about it tho.
It does take the handcraft out of it, in that sense an LLM-made tool would be more akin to IKEA stuff compared to a handcrafted work of art (though I struggle to call even hand-made electron crap a work of art, lol).
But yeah I know what you mean, they are usually half-finished solutions.
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.
Dead Comment
I'm using a new account and will likely use one forever, as I don't want lots of posts linked together, nor do I care about points or karma or whatever it's called. My first few comments are always shadowbanned. I also see lots of dead posts for new accounts with "showdead" turned on. A lot of them are normal, useful comments, some are inflammatory or just plain stupid. I haven't seen many comments that seem to be AI generated. Maybe they are and I just don't see it, idk.
Anyway, if a comment passes some basic filter (doesn't post shady links or talk about VIAGRA or 11 INCH PENIS or something spammy), I hope they still show up, even as "dead". On this account I copied 1 dead comment to give it more visibility and I've done it before a few times, too. The comment is still dead, btw (id 47262467). And maybe instead of (shadow)banning new users/posts, just make a separate view for old/established account and another one for all posters.
I would also be glad if I could solve some CPU- or RAM-intensive task as PoW. If I really had to, I'd pay with Monero or something similar, as long as it's an anonymous currency with low fees so a payment equivalent to 25 cents wouldn't incur a big fee. I wouldn't pay more per account (especially when I rotate them), as I've been a lurker for years and only recently started posting, anyway (so I don't care that much if I can post).
Finally, thanks for letting us sign up over Tor. :)
In the current system people can vouch for dead posts from shadowbanned new accounts, if I understand correctly. It seems people do it, to a certain degree at least, because I rarely see good comments that stay dead forever.
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.
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.
I'm joking, of course. If your comment was generated by Eliza it would have started with "How do you feel about 'I think your comment...'" :)
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.
And it's becoming more and more difficult - not just by AI getting "better" (and training removing many of the telltale signs), but also because regular people "learn" to write like an AI does. We're seeing it with "algospeak" - young terminally online people literally say stuff like "unalived" in the meatspace nowadays.
We're living in a 1984 LARP.
Some is also horribly easy. If the text is full of:
- Overly positive commentary and encouragement
- Constant use of bullet point lists, bolding and emoji
- This quaint forced 'funniness', like a misplaced attempt at being lighthearted
- A lot of blablah that just missed the point
- Not concise and to the point, but also not super long
Then that really screams ChatGPT to me.
I think it's because this seems to be the default styling of ChatGPT. When people tailor their prompt to be more specific about style it's a lot harder to detect but if they just dump a few lines of instructions about the content into it, this is what you'll get. So the low-effort slop is still pretty easy to detect IMO.
But in practice, I frequently encounter a comment that either screams generic LLM slop or even just as a vague indefinable "vibe" due to one or more telltale signs, so that's red flag #1. Then, I go to the comment history, at that point if it's really a bot/claw/agent or a poster heavily using LLMs I'll usually find page after page of cookie cutter repeats of the exact same "LLM smell" (even if that account has been prompted to avoid em-dashes/lists/etc, they still trend towards repetition of their own style).
At that point a human moderator would have more than enough evidence to ban an account. It's not like we're talking about a death sentence or something. If no clear pattern of abuse from the long term commenting activity, then give them the benefit of the doubt and move on.
Maybe there can be a dedicated 'flag botspam' button?
Then again it's a nuanced issue. I see AI used in a large percentage of writing now, so would this rule apply to the article as well?
I would argue that those cases are really the ones that cause an LLM-specific harm, i.e., which make people feel like they aren't exclusively among fellow humans.
If someone posts something that doesn't clearly read LLM-ish, but is otherwise terrible, it's not really different from if the same terrible thing had been written by hand.
I don't think anyone who objects to LLM comments is really demanding a super-low false negative rate. Just get rid of the zero-effort stuff. For example, recently I've seen a lot of comments from new accounts that are just sycophantic towards TFA and try to highlight / summarize a specific idea or two, but don't really demonstrate any original thought (just, like, basic reading comprehension and an ability to express agreement). And they'll take a paragraph to do so, where a human with the same level of interest in the material might just say "good post" (granted, there's an argument to be made for excluding that, too).
Those low value complaints add nothing to the conversation, and the content didnt make it to the front page because it was bad. If the sole objection is "AI bad", keep it to yourself....its boring.
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.
And what about users like this, whose comment are very much entirely LLM generated and possibly even a bot? https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=BelVisgarra
Hard disagree. I have been learning another language and wouldn’t pretend to write posts after an LLM rewrote it because it is literally lower effort than learning the language correctly.
Like definitionally, you are using a machine to offload effort. I don’t know how you could claim that is not “low effort” when that’s the point of the tool.
> Some people can really benefit from using LLMs to help them write. E.g. non-native speakers.
/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.
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.
Deleted Comment
What if someone used an LLM to just translate?
I have no idea what that could be useful for, but since the Turing test is now essentially beaten maybe its usefulness has come and gone too.
> 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?
It sounds like a fast, efficient, inexpensive and foolproof recipe for destroying a community. Let's use that as a future test: anyone who advocates for it is undeniably trying to destroy HN, so they get downvoted to 1 karma and permanently blocked from voting on anything else.
Dead Comment
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'.
Deleted Comment
Wow this is really cyberpunk.
I'll bring my Yubikey!
I'd also like to see an "Order of the White Lotus" community (or Fight Club if you prefer) where people who collectively agree to not use AI against each other can come together. They can still use AI (i.e. out of necessity) just not with other members knowingly.
I suspect whatever form it takes the stakes will be very high to hack yourself into and pollute the space. So the more successful the community becomes, the harder it is to keep in order.
I do like your idea, though.
Local groups have a problem where members admit their friends or pressure others into inviting their friends who are not a net positive, but it feels too impolite to refuse or to kick someone out. Meeting someone in person also develops a sense of a social bond that makes it harder to downvote or flag their posts.
Local groups have always been a haven for affinity fraud, too. Running a scam is easier when you can smile, be charismatic, and pretend to be a personal friend before springing your ask on to your victims.
p.s. @patrickmay: jinx!
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.
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.
Welcome. Illegitimi non carborundum.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
It’s a speed bump at best.
Actively encouraging this will only make things worse.
Deleted Comment
I'd rather see you gone than the people you complain about.
Deleted Comment
I didn't actually create my account until 2021? 2022? I can't remember. And I didn't make my first post or even comment until just last week.
While I think a minimum post count or reputation metric could perhaps reduce the AI generated posts, introducing friction also makes it harder for real people to contribute anything meaningful.
Furthermore, what does it matter if it's "AI generated"? Is some AI content ok? What's the pass/fail threshold on human vs AI generated text?
I made a Show post last week where I heavily relied on AI. I'm sure there are some "tells." But even so, I spent more than three hours working on the content of my post and my first response. Would my post have been acceptable to you?
If a human put his effort into it, is proud of it and wants to show it to the world, i'm happy to invest some time to have a look at it and maybe provide some helpful feedback.
I'm not willing to invest my time into evaluating the more or less correct sounding ideas of a ML model.
Some of us need assistance to communicate effectively. And for me, yes that took 3 hours even with this assistance.