Please do so. And, forgive me if I speak heresy, but there has to be more proof of work (friction) to create accounts. I was shocked at how easy it is for something like chatgpt atlas to create new accounts on the fly.

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.

Agree, HN can't be immune to what happens in the programming world. Would be great though if we can have a way to mute or hide accounts. This way each HN user will be able to clean his own feed of articles.

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.

I was thinking of setting up a system to highlight sock-puppeters and other consistent-rule-violating accounts, as a 'fun project' that might improve the HN experience. But it strikes me that the HN staff probably already does something like this, they may not welcome a side-loaded project of this sort, and it would require some automated crawling of HN (which again may be unwelcomed). Finally, I don't actually have experience in this area. Is this something that would be welcomed, or unwanted?

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'.

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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326101

For all accounts or just new ones?

A site can't easily be immune to macro trends in authentic dicussion, but it can be significantly immune to inauthentic uses.

That's sad there have been some really neat things shared that way but you gotta do what ya gotta do.

Why not let the users choose at settings? like "Show dead" ?

Yep, just tried to post and I'm not able. Unfortunate. :/

Here's an idea: allow downvotes for green posts with published guidelines on when downvoting is and is not appropriate. We can collectively filter out the pure spam efficiently to make it less worthwhile to post.

Minimum karma perhaps?

It's easy for people to game but it's at least one more effort-based hurdle.

I welcome this. Lots of AI slop has been thrown on to this site and the drawbridge needs to be eventually raised a little.

Can't allow low-quality posting from new accounts here but thank you for listening to the concerns.

It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.

It’s worse than that. On r/news they shadow ban anybody who doesn’t have verified email. No message or anything. Just nobody sees your comments. I probably made 20 or more comments there over a few months before I figured it out. It felt humiliating.

There needs to o be a distinction between creating a post and replying.

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.

I agree. I faced this in the psychology subreddit, forced to quit. They wanted karma to post comments, but without posting comments, how am I supposed to get karma specific within that community?

Literally me on a DIY sub. I needed some advice, got auto removed, never went back.

Same for stack overflow. I tried it once. Never engage with stack overflow ever since. Whereas I am active here. If this goes, I am not posting here either. This is then another echo chamber

100% agreed on this

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

> waiting 30days, farming karma

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.

you are indeed describing my reddit experience, hence why I did not participate there while being a human

I certainly hope they do something.

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?

Someone telling you about their AI created project is like someone telling you their dream they had last night.

I'm not sure if LLM projects doesn't mean they were not made with love. It just makes programming accessible to more people, but essentially it's still just a tool.

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.

> 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.

You can use a longer-established /hn/account to vouch your burner's posts... unless you're worried about /hn/ linking your accounts, too (not just public scraping) — which they can, by IP address.

> 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.

I think your comment was generated by an LLM and hereby vote for your immediate and permanent instant ban.

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.

The moderators are supposed to just know it when they see it? It's that black and white to you? Or are lots of false positives a price we have to pay?

People accuses everything of being LLM generated these days. That'd be a tough rule to enforce.

Do this with submissions, too. Or at least put some indicator that it's AI generated.

The guidelines haven't even been updated to say that AI generated posts and submission aren't permitted even though it's been the policy for a couple of years now if one searches for postings by the moderators. So outsiders and new HN users have no reason to know that it's not allowed. I'm sure there are reasons for it but the inaction is all very mysterious from an outsider perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What if someone used an LLM to just translate?

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

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'.

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.

> 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.

"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.

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.

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.)

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.

I'm somewhat keen to adopt ATProto's feed generators and/or labeller concepts to create an alternative /new and comment prioritizer

> 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.

I would argue that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Adding a cost to commenting that requires aging accounts I think might discourage fly by night operations and "experiments".

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.

I wish for karma based too if we managed to get filters. I want to see posts only by accounts with {x}+ karma points.

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.

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.

I don't understand why we put locks on bicycles, a determined person can just saw them off.

My prediction is that nothing short of human verification is going to solve this.

> 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?

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.

I don't care if the code is generated, i care if the content is. I don't want to read another "No complexity. No fuss. No buzzwords". "It's not just a tool, its a lifestyle". Its sooooo boring...

If you're going to spend 3 hours making a post, why not just write it yourself in the first place and avoid the issue and the reputational damage?

Just write the text yourself, not many people enjoy reading AI-generated posts, even edited.

The return of Advogato. If you weren't around for it, it had a certification system like what you describe, so the stuff on it was pretty good. After a while, spammers figured out that it had very high search engine placement because of its quality, and that pretty much ruined it. It's gone now.

I sometimes feel like a paid newsletter that's curated by users would be fun. I'd happily pay €5 a month for a weekly/daily digest where the comments are en par with HN.

The risk is to build very good echo chambers. One shouldn’t have to read AI slop or despicable opinions during their free time, but some exposure to alternative respectable and not idiotic views should be part of the design.

>will be based almost entirely on trust networks

Like Facebook/Linkedin?

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).

But the issue is not only show HN, even generic posts are increasingly from new accounts, some of them are reaching front page too.

One example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884481

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...

Well it's not just that... picture a community group talking among themselves and then some rando shows up, yells "I built this thing that you all might like", hangs out for an hour and then is never heard from again.

I think that's great in moderation as it stimulates ideas and discussions, shows us what folks are working on, etc... but this can't become Product Hunt. The reasons for posting here should be vastly different than posting on Product Hunt.

Except the quality hasn't been getting higher. Most of those projects wouldn't be considered HN worthy if a human being had made them, they only get the praise they do because they were generated by an LLM and as such they aren't projects so much as demonstrations of the latest model's capabilities.

Also the purpose of Show HN along with HN in general is to spark intellectual curiosity and create interesting conversation, and nothing about LLM generated code does that, because the person who prompted the AI to make it doesn't understand it and can't discuss it in any depth.

> 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).

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.

$1 is an incredibly low price to pay for advertising and an incredibly high price to pay for legitimately interacting with a community. This would have the exact opposite of the intended effect.

Charging money does not seem a very good idea in a site like this where you expect users to upload all the content. Also this would require credit card info which is a massive barrier, even if you were to charge just 1 cent.

That was Elon's idea for Twitter but the X membership scope grew in scope. $1/m sounds better.

$1 is not going to stop people from spamming. It's just $1 after all...

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!

Reverse captchas are fun. Click this button 10,000 times to prove that you're a robot!

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?!?

We need new ways to prove our humanness.

Or grade accounts by the logarithm of how many accounts were registered before them, like Slashdot. (This is tongue in cheek as I assume yours was.)

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?

> 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.

Yes, and sometimes some of the HN automatic filters kills the comments. Remember to "vouch" the comments if they are interesting/relevant, a few "vouches" unkill the comments. And in extreme cases, send an email to hn@ycombinator.com so dang/tomhow can take a look and use some magic to fix the problem.

>Losing that seems too high of a price to pay.

Assuming the mods just auto-ban new accounts and require them to be vouched and to earn minimum karma before being visible, those comments can be vouched up or approved by the moderators. The poster won't know that they've been banned, of course, because that's how shadowbanning works, so the approval process should be seamless for them.

But how often does that happen versus the AI comments and alt account trolling?

>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.

The consensus is and has always been clear. Generated comments of any kind have never been allowed. People just don't care, and that's a problem.

And those comments are malicious in effect if not intent. We're here to have conversations with human beings, the intellectual and emotional connection is important. What is the point of having conversations with a machine, much less not knowing one is having a conversation with a machine? If nothing else, it's dehumanizing and a waste of time.

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.

Comments should be allowed from day one, but submissions should require some experience and karma.

The solution is for the users to be able to mute/hide accounts. It won't matter if an account has 10k points, once you mute it, you won't see what it posts.

This has long been my biggest issue, much bigger than new accounts spamming slop. There are accounts with 10000x karma that do little more than feed links from the NY Times and similar publications, regardless of their relevance or value.

Each one gets 4-5 karma, a few crack double digits. Post 10 or 20 a day over a year or two and they're five figures. Pure farming.

Well were they interesting?

Fwiw, email hn@ycombinator.com and the moderators will take a closer look and ban the voting and comment ring if they deem it suspicious.

me to

I have a chrome plugin I made that gives me some personal social features (tagging people), it can block: https://s.h4x.club/yAuNoQDe

I understand and appreciate your perspective. I do, however, disagree with your priorities. I mostly read here, but when I participate I want to interact with humans, not chatbots. I would much rather read a human comment with typos and poor grammar than another piece of anodyne LLM output that shows only that the responsible party doesn't value the human interaction that I do.

A good way to find your account restricted.

The target audience for malware authors/distributors typically isn't a community full of technically literate software engineers, security practitioners, reverse engineers, malware analysts, etc.

Same reason that burglars don't typically target security camera stores and robbers don't typically target police departments - it's basically a fast-track to early detection, which disrupts the main objective of the adversary.

If everyone turned off new account visibility, we'd just see the same noise 30 days later.. not sure that helps.

It’s going to end up like the flag button. Disagree with opinion in the post -> tag as AI-generated spam. Not that I disagree with the idea necessarily, probably a few safeguards around it like only certain users can tag and pattern over time would fix it.

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"! :)

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.

I also do this. Pretty much every time I move.

can be fun though

> I find it's worse here now than X.

I disagree, but in any case the easy solution in that case is to use X instead of HN.

> At least on X reply bots are not allowed anymore.

In theory, maybe.

HN has mostly turned into a reddit bis since 2023, with tons of topics that have absolutely nothing to do with startup, tech or programming but are directly taken from of r/news ... I'll take bots spamming fake projects over petty divise partisan politics.

Yep - and if you have an opinion on one particular side that isn’t favored here, it gets flagged.

I don't think people are blasted for using AI (mostly), I think people are blasted for low effort work, just like pre-LLMs. LLMs just made it way easier to complete low effort projects, so therefore there is more of it.

My experience with reporting stuff to mods is that people who post racist stuff do get banned but I also think there's a difference between holding opinions I consider based in racism or having racist outcomes (which I don't report), and posting actually racist stuff (which I do report).

Used to. The job has apparently gotten a lot harder now.

Please don't post snarky, shallow dismissals. That's been against the guidelines for a long time.

Genuine innovation is what we most want to encourage. That's what Show HN has always been about.

The problem now is that coding assistants have dramatically lowered the bar for getting a product or tool working, without the need for much innovation. We need new ways of identifying projects that are genuinely innovative so that their creators can be fairly rewarded, rather than being drowned out.