i_think_so (u/i_think_so)

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

randusername · 7 days ago

How about an opt-in toggle to display the year each account was created?

randusername_2022

I'm right on the boundary of the slopocene, not sure if in or out.

i_think_so · 6 days ago

So now we're going to create a black market for old HN accounts?

Am I too late to get ahead of the curve and stockpile some, while they're still relatively cheap?

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

janfoeh · 7 days ago

Ooh, it's time to pull out the classics! Please feel free to check the boxes as you see fit, as I am currently too lazy to have Claude do it for me.

  Your post advocates a

  ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

  approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

  ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
  ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
  ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
  ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
  ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
  ( ) Users of email will not put up with it
  ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
  ( ) The police will not put up with it
  ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
  ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
  ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
  ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
  ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

  Specifically, your plan fails to account for

  ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
  ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
  ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
  ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
  ( ) Asshats
  ( ) Jurisdictional problems
  ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
  ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
  ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
  ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
  ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
  ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
  ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
  ( ) Extreme profitability of spam
  ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
  ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
  ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
  ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
  ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
  ( ) Outlook

  and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

  ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
  been shown practical
  ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
  ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
  ( ) Blacklists suck
  ( ) Whitelists suck
  ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
  ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
  ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
  ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
  ( ) Sending email should be free
  ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
  ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
  ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
  ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
  ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
  ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

  Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

  ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
  ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
  ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
  house down!

i_think_so · 6 days ago

This is what I'm here for. Cheers! :-)

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

eudamoniac · 7 days ago

My system has been working pretty well: using some extension or another that has mute functionality, if I see a person post an extremely low quality comment, I look at their comment history for two or three pages. If there is no comment of value in that set, I mute the user. The board gets better each day.

i_think_so · 6 days ago

Are you doing that here? What extension(s) do you use for it?

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

krapp · 7 days ago

People will need to participate otherwise there won't be any new content. I see it as just like vouching, except someone has to vouch for green accounts. A slightly more equitable (and easier to implement) version of lobste.rs' invite tree.

What I want is for green accounts not to be abused as much as they are. The number of noxious, vitriolic troll alt accounts and bots is getting ridiculous. That is almost entirely the fault of established users of course, but there's no way to deal with them poisoning the well without affecting new users.

i_think_so · 6 days ago

I think you missed @sltkr's point. HN wouldn't just have less new content; it would fail to develop new users. That kind of stagnation is how sites like this die.

Aggressively filtering to raise the average post quality is a sugar rush and it has the metaphorical long term consequences of type-2 diabetes. Things start out feeling great but the acceleration of death is effectively guaranteed.

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

brewdad · 7 days ago

First interview question is to submit a handwriting sample.

i_think_so · 6 days ago

I taught myself to type because most people can't read my handwriting.

I would be so screwed. :-(

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

AnimalMuppet · 7 days ago

Exactly. If your LLM wrote it, then my LLM can read it. I don't want to.

i_think_so · 6 days ago

God help us if we get to the point where we need an LLM agent to do the reading and filtering of all our social content for us. I am completely certain that is a downward spiral that ends with the collapse of our society and I give it 50/50 odds for killing off the entire species.

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

throwaway2037 · 6 days ago

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?

i_think_so · 6 days ago

Maybe we need a reverse Turing test and award -- humans write things that are indistinguishable from AI slop.

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.

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

i_think_so · 6 days ago

This obviously should have been done years ago. @dang is there a reason it hasn't?

i_think_so · 6 days ago

..so updating the guidelines is beyond the pale and suggesting it is downvote worthy?

How very interesting.

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

edanm · 6 days ago

I wasn't talking about someone learning the language and using this instead of learning it.

There are a lot of people who understand English fairly well, but are not actively learning the language, are not native speakers, and can use LLMs to catch grammar mistakes that they otherwise wouldn't notice. Or catch small nuances in what they are saying, small implications that could otherwise go unnoticed.

In general, I push back on people saying "I can't find a good/legitimate use for this technology, therefore there are no good/legitimate use for it".

i_think_so · 6 days ago

> In general, I push back on people saying "I can't find a good/legitimate use for this technology, therefore there are no good/legitimate use for it".

Is that genuinely what you think most of the complaints on HN are saying?

IMNSHO that's an absurd statement to make about the other side of the argument. I'm still giving the benefit of the doubt here but jeeze, this really smells like a strawman.

There are dozens of whole classes of criticism of these tools that I see made on HN, and none of them fall into the category you described.

Ex: Saying "juniors who rely on Copilot/Claud/etc become lazy and can create low quality code without learning how to do better" is night and day different from what you're saying. And that's a criticism that must be addressed or the entire global software industry will destroy itself in two generations.

Surely the difference between that and "we don't want anybody to use Grammarly in their subs that show up here" is completely obvious, yes?

i_think_so commented on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting · Posted by u/Oras

edanm · 6 days ago

I should clarify — I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing. I think comments should be judged on their quality, not on how they were written.

I might agree (don't know) with the idea of limiting new accounts more heavily.

i_think_so · 6 days ago

> I disagree with disallowing any comments that used LLMs in the writing.

I think the point here is that the community doesn't want to read AI slop, not that using an LLM to clean up your writing contains some inherent evil that prevents quality.

I don't want to accuse you of strawmanning the argument, but honestly, where did you ever see someone advocating the latter?