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 o...
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.
Comments
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...
By laborcontract 2026-03-0820:3611 reply 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.
By magicalhippo 2026-03-0821:0912 reply The problem is that we might lose some gold.
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.
Indeed. Here is a recent litmus test: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852. How can we filter the lightweight stuff while still benefiting from posts like these?
(a bit more about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056384, with a reply from the OP)
One thing we did at reddit for a while was put posts from new people in "jail". They would show up in a special yellow box at the top of the home page to accounts that tended to be early upvoters of things that became successful later (our Nostradamusus so to speak), and then if it got enough upvotes from that group it got out of jail and placed on the regular /new page.
So maybe some sort of filter like that? Only show it to those kinds of accounts at first?
The downside is that if that group isn't big enough you get a lot of groupthink, but if your sample is wide enough, it can be avoided. To be honest, I don't recall why we stopped doing it.
By wizardforhire 2026-03-093:291 reply Just sharing observations it may help, it may not…
what I’m seeing is new or sleeper accounts that have been idle for over a decade with low (<99) karma getting into comment circles. Over the last couple of weeks i’ll see several top comments on articles with back and forth between other similar accounts… it’s got to the point that I check a user habitually before I even bother reading… and I have never hidden so many comments before getting to something substantive in the comments…
Like many here, I don’t wish to limit new users, but this does seem from my armchair perspective to be a pattern to be on the look out for.
By Teever 2026-03-096:46 This is interesting. Can you link to some of these?
I've noticed this kind of behavior on Reddit but never on HM
Maybe have a signup flow where you can skip the new account restriction by putting some file on a website of some currently trending link. And then the restriction is lifted temporarily for the thread linking to it?
By LordDragonfang 2026-03-0922:28 Not every post is from the website of the person who is the topic of it. It's common to have e.g. a blogpost about $thing and then a new account chimes in with "Hey, I authored $thing 10 years ago when I was working for $company, someone linked me this post. [some contributions to the topic]"
I have often heard that vote rigging is detectable on HN because the site software penalizes voting from accounts at the same IP address.
Rumor had it that there is also some kind of social-network metric detecting when socially adjacent accounts (or alts) are engaged in astroturfing, the practice where a small cabal tries to pass themselves off as a broader grassroots campaign.
Flip that around though and the same metrics might allow new accounts to be meaningfully vouched for by existing ones.
By mudkipdev 2026-03-094:52 I think vote rigging detection might be based on the length of your session
By throwaway2037 2026-03-101:19 Sorry, I need to ask the dumb question: Is that Show HN (AsteroidOS) post written by an LLM or not? Honestly, I cannot tell.
A few people in these comments seem wildly confident that it is written by an LLM. If anything, I hope it was written by a human as an elaborate troll to trigger these so-called immaculate LLM detectors.
Interesting litmus test, as the post isn't just green, it's riddled with LLM copyediting. Doesn't read as if originally composed by an LLM, so there's that.
Would seem to require some discernment to classify. Not all assistive use is slop.
Some litmus test. I am sooo tired of statements like "No x. No y. No z." and then optionally "Just Foo.".
Who aside from Fred fucking Durst writes like that?
Ugh... Clearly llm generated. This is how internet has become. 90% of posts are variations of tropes like these.
By throwaway2037 2026-03-101:07
I disagree. This is a classic humor template in popular magazines from the 1990s and 2000s. The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" probably has/had this style frequently. Also, (Timothy) McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is basically an extended trope of exactly this type of writing from 1990s and 2000s.> I am sooo tired of statements like "No x. No y. No z." and then optionally "Just Foo.". Who aside from Fred fucking Durst writes like that?
I mean I guess you're right - I didn't notice it, because the community reaction to the project was so positive.
> Not all assistive use is slop.
That's right, and the key is to discern which posts/projects are interesting.
By thinkingemote 2026-03-098:421 reply The discussion about the LLM assisted/written submission at the time, with replies by the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055300 The defence given was essentially "just reformatted it for better grammar"
It's obviously says LLM to me at first read through.
I suspect that:
a) less people are willing to expend a bit of energy to notice LLM usage given how much of it is. ("we've lost" theory)
b) that people are losing the ability to detect LLM submissions. ("we're cooked" theory)
or c) that people don't care about the use of LLM. ("who cares" theory).
Personally I've been feeling less invested, because it seems as if most users don't care and even the main users of the site don't notice it.
Do you have any good links to guides on how to spot? I would like to care, but its hard to tell. and then what do we do when we spot it?
By thinkingemote 2026-03-0918:521 reply One guide that i hope is kept up to date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing . Generally though it's a kind of pattern recognition which for some patterns seems visible to me.
I should clarify and revise my thoughts and initial comment. I do not think that not being able to detect it leads to lack of care. I actually think that many things have passed me by and in the future this will be even more as LLMs improve ("we're cooked").
As to "what do we do when we spot it" - you hit the nail on the head of the feelings I felt as I was writing the comment. What do we actually do, what can we change and should we attempt futile things?
And even the example dang gave - the actual submission as very good. Is any amount of LLM use okay and what's the level? I use LLMs at work but I don't like writing readmes or blog posts with it. But others might like writing code at work by hand and don't like writing text so use LLMs for that. Maybe I lower my expectations!
By mrlonglong 2026-03-1022:57 Or even train LLM to catch LLMs. Like that old adage, use criminals to catch criminals.
You would need, say, a StackExchange-like crowdsourced moderation system whereby users with relatively high karma are randomly selected to check posts from new account, by casting votes to reject or keep.
By LordDragonfang 2026-03-0922:30 HN already has something like that -- high-karma accounts can flag comments/posts which are a poor fit for HN. It's just a blacklist, not a whitelist.
>How can we filter the lightweight stuff while still benefiting from posts like these?
Well, the simplest automated method would be to run the post and comment together through an LLM with a prompt that's roughly:
"Is this person claiming to be the author or co-creator of the work discussed in this submission?"
Only green accounts subject to it. I predict you'd probably have a very low false positive and false negative rate.
It's of course a terribly slippery slope. My perhaps overly-cynical take is that once the infra is place some of your bosses would be prone to eventually abusing it.
Personally I'm here for it: Dang, moderator turned whistleblower—on the run from dark VC money—in a race against time to save freedom. Still working on a title for the film.
By hinkley 2026-03-0822:18 Responding from a new account is different from posting from a new account. You aren’t vetting people by making accounts have a minimum age to post articles. That’ll just cause people to make accounts before they need them.
Reddit has forums where you need a minimum karma to post to certain subreddits and that is typically upvotes on your comments, but it could also be upvotes on someone else’s moderated subreddit.
I think the right people will stick around. There is a certain kind of indivudal that has the paitence to understand that a system that restricts new accounts from post is a good thing. Of recent, there have been a lot of posters that come here from the open web just to try and slant opinion.
But sticking around doesn't solve the scenario mentioned by parent.
1. some interesting projects gets to HN main page
2. author of the project is not on HN so creates a green account and interacts
even if that person would have the patience to stick around, by the time they would be able to respond, it would be too late for it to be relevant to the (now stale) discussion.
By qingcharles 2026-03-093:341 reply This is one of the best things about HN. The sheer number of times someone has posted a link and the author or someone significant to the project deep within some megacorp makes a green account and starts answering questions that you never thought would get answered. Some of the most golden replies come from greenies.
By dang 2026-03-095:45 Yes, and we've always gone out of our way to protect those. It's perhaps the thing I hate the most about our software that sometimes it kills such posts.
By ddingus 2026-03-093:30 These are some of the best interactions we have here.
For sure a problem worth considering.
I can't think of anything easy...
Only even remotely sensible thought I have at present:
We add a check box to replies created by new accounts. Maybe created by all accounts?
The prompt reads something to the effect of: I am mentioned in the article. And then they get to say how.
-This is my project -I am mentioned by name -Etc...
Whatever it is they wrote, appears somehow, maybe as a required line or something.
Others can see that and either flag the account or vouch.
This at least some what distributes the required attention load.
That said, I don't like it. Have nothing better, so here it is!
Then others seeing that
By thaumasiotes 2026-03-090:58 > even if that person would have the patience to stick around, by the time they would be able to respond, it would be too late for it to be relevant to the (now stale) discussion
This is a fundamental part of how HN sees its own functioning; they refer to it as "rate limiting".
I believe HN's success is in large part not presuming to have a good idea of what "the right people" are.
This doesn't mean it doesn't have a strong sense of what bad behavior is. It clearly does.
By wizzwizz4 2026-03-0822:15 I am only that kind of individual when I'm inclined to post unconstructively – not that I know that, at the time. When I'm feeling constructive, friction is likely to make me take my constructive energies elsewhere.
By Waterluvian 2026-03-0822:451 reply The SA Forums model does accomplish the goals of filtering out noise, but then you’re stuck with a stagnant community of “the right people.”
Unironically slashdot's moderating and meta-moderating is the best long-term system I've seen.
Everything else seems to eventually cause new blood to dry up.
I remember reading slashdot but what is their system? Is there a separate set of mods that moderate the moderators?
By throwaway173738 2026-03-091:231 reply You get points to mod other people and other people can meta-mod your posts.
By bombcar 2026-03-092:42 The key is that both were randomly assigned to users - you’d never know if you’d open a thread and be a moderator. If you posted in the thread you couldn’t moderate.
And about the same frequency you’d be assigned to metamoderate, basically being asked if a moderator’s “vote” was a good one or not (you didn’t have to fully agree you’d do the same, just that it wasn’t bad).
Someone who scored low in meta moderation would get less or no moderator chances.
By trinsic2 2026-03-0915:37 I stopped reading slashdot along time ago.. I wonder why.
Seems like restricting posts but not comments from a fresh account would thread that needle pretty well?
By johnnyanmac 2026-03-0821:291 reply I'm surprised posts aren't restricted a bit more. Maybe that's just my old school "lurk moar" mentality, but I feel like I really need to understand the vibes of a community before I start to contribute posts to it.
True
Mm, balancing against “long-time lurker, made an account just to post this”…
By AnimalMuppet 2026-03-0823:07 Yeah, exactly. Thirteen years ago, I was a lurker. No account, because why would I make an account just to read? But when I wanted to say something badly enough, I made an account. (I think the first thing I did is post an Ask HN about functional programming, so "no posting for X time" might have turned me away.)
By SoftTalker 2026-03-0821:535 reply I'd suggest: new accounts are read-only for at least a week. Then they can comment (rate limited at first, gradually relaxed) and vote, and then after some additional amount of time and/or karma they can submit a post. Maybe some of these mechanisms are already in place? Bots can probably game this too but drive-by bots maybe won't be patient enough.
Immediate comment privileges are really important. Lots of examples, but to give a silly one, someone pastes their clipboard without realizing it includes their API key or their email. Good Samaritans should be able to say, "Hey, I just caught something."
And, as another commenter mentions, if someone shares your work, you should be able to comment on that thread without delay.
By VorpalWay 2026-03-0822:11 This is the only reason I got myself a HN account: someone posted a link to a blog post of mine, and I happened to see the increased traffic on my VPS.
(And I stuck around after, a few posts are interesting enough. All the AI stuff isn't, and there is too much of that unfortunately.)
You reminded me how infuriating it was not to be able to post comments on StackOverflow. Felt like getting those few upvotes required was taking forever, and all without ability to ask for clarification.
By Barbing 2026-03-1020:29 Goodness that is rough, then they instantly own your posts where blanking edits are vandalism (obviously great for the internet, albeit at potential occasional individual cost).
It seems easy enough to circumvent: "We're launching our product in 2 weeks, so let the AI create and 'warm up' 20 new HN users so they're ready to shill".
It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(
If someone is going to put that much effort into to it, let them. I think the ideas here are to try to get some low hanging fruit to see if that works “good enough”. You’ll never block all AI generated accounts, but you may not have to and still have the desired effect.
But if someone wants to plant 20 new accounts, grow them out with karma votes, so that they can game the voting, there are probably other ways to detect that.
By intended 2026-03-092:22 The issue is that it’s not that much effort anymore.
We rely on friction for most of our social norms.
Any amount of friction reduces the amount of slop. What proportion of clankers are going to realize that they need to warm up the accounts two weeks in advance? Answer: a proportion that your never going to see with that barrier in place.
With a couple few layers of defense, you'll weed out almost all of the bad actors. Without strong monetary incentives for spamming, you also avoid most persistent actors.
By localuser13 2026-03-090:252 reply With enough layers you will also weed out almost all of the good actors. Normal people are busy and don't have time nor patience to jump over too many hoops to promote their cool new research, or to respond in a thread where someone linked it.
By heavyset_go 2026-03-093:212 reply Reddit has more friction to sign up or post while new or low karma.
The main subreddits will basically shadowban you until your account is aged and has more than X karma.
This is why I don’t create a Reddit account or post there: there are so many rules that dissuade new accounts. I don’t even bother to try.
By qingcharles 2026-03-093:44 Reddit is fantastic, to me. It's worth the struggle to get past the initial bullshit.
There are a lot of flaws, though. Their appeal system is very broken, for instance.
By qingcharles 2026-03-093:431 reply Which in itself is annoying, IMO. It creates a whole separate set of problems. You need karma, so people post in karma-farming subs to get a few crumbs. Then you get auto-banned from a dozen of the top subreddits preemptively for farming.
Reddit hasn't been as overrun by bots yet, for the most part, although how long they can hold out I don't know.
By pixelmelt 2026-03-094:54 maybe not overrun by spam, but the amount of bots I see on popular subs is definitely not 0
By intended 2026-03-092:27 You don’t have a choice.
We live with GenAI, and the human to bot ratio is now leaning in a different direction. The old norms are dead, because the old structures that held them up are gone.
This idea that theres “more hoops - losing participation” on this thread keeps assuming that the community is unaffected by the macro trends.
It’s weirdly positing that HN posts and users, are somehow immune/unaffected by those trends.
Requiring accounts to be a certain age does not help and will only affect legitimate users. The slopsters will simply create accounts, wait a bit and start posting then.
Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra
Oh damn, that's the one who posted the AskHN about the verified job portal on the frontpage today. Either this is some chilling still in build up, or it's an actual human being with severe LLM slop impersonation derangement syndrome.
By christofosho 2026-03-0823:451 reply Yikes. That account is like the epitome of LLM posting. It's a shame, too, because it makes me feel less inclined to read discussion on this forum.
By basilikum 2026-03-090:51 Yeah, unfortunately there are bots here that are much better at hiding that and even do language mistakes on purpose.
It's still a small minority of comments, but it's definitely getting a problem and just the chance — even if it's small one — of talking to a bot, rather than a human causes inhibition. Finding out that one has been talking to a bot is finding out you've been scammed. You invest time and human emotions into something for another human to read, even if it's just a quick HN comment, just to find out that it was all for nothing. It sucks the humanity out of it and thereby out of oneself. You get tricked into spending your valuable limited human social energy on soulless machines with infinite capacity of generating worthless slop instead of on other humans.
By cozzyd 2026-03-092:53 didn't even bother not using an em dash...
By 1718627440 2026-03-095:35 If most people are like my on that topic, then they use HN without an account, until they want to post or comment something, then they try to find out how to create an account. If they won't be able to post or comment then, then they will just not create or retain that account.
I was able to have discussions where one party has significantly unpopular opinions. Such discussions are unique to HN, please don't kill them.
By huddert 2026-03-0823:35 [flagged]
By ThrowawayR2 2026-03-0821:261 reply If that were to happen, I'd also suggest that comments from fresh accounts should also have URLs deleted or disabled.
By Barbing 2026-03-0822:04 Even something like…
Example[.]com
But don’t worry, HN has been thoughtful about links from new accounts for months and months (can’t speak for longer, but maybe/probably). Effort could well be duplicative unless I’m unaware of some more granular detail.
By moralestapia 2026-03-0822:07 Totally.
I don't think the solution is changing the dynamic but flagging, this site self-moderates quite well, aside from dang and tomhow's great work.
This problem can be solved by an invite/vouch for system.
New account can be invited or vouched for by an old account with good karma. If an account that you vouched for starts spamming and/or slopposting, you lose your vouching for abilities for a period of time or forever.
By throwaway2037 2026-03-093:451 reply I didn't know anybody here before I joined. (I have been here for a few years, and I still don't know anybody here.) How would a person like me get invited or vouched?
Ask you IRL friends or colleagues from your job "hey, do you happen to have an HN account?"
If the discussion is related to a public project, like in the examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303604
...you can use existing communication channels (website, readme on github) to ask people for an invite to participate in it.
By throwaway2037 2026-03-109:34 I am pretty sure that none of my friends nor co-workers read HN. Whenever I have shared stuff, none of them have heard of HN.
By grapheneposter 2026-03-0823:14 Yes that is exactly what I just did, some of us are just getting around to having time to post
By intended 2026-03-092:30 These changes aren’t being suggested in a vacuum.
It’s perhaps unintentional, but your framing makes it seem that this is a baseless whimsy.
At this point, it appears that we will be talking to bots more than humans.
It’s a brave new world, and not adapting to it will see the humans leave.
By dwedge 2026-03-0913:27 Heh until this moment I thought green was a respected account somehow - like moderators on Reddit
By gmerc 2026-03-0913:12 the death of the press should give you all the answers you need on this one.
By 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2026-03-0823:281 reply Honest question, what are the alternatives to HN?
Because if new account restrictions create enough friction, you lose legitimate users who periodically rotate accounts for privacy reasons.
At some point the annoyance tips toward just lurking, and a forum where only old accounts talk is a stagnant forum given enough time.
Lobste.rs comes to mind. High enough friction that, even as a seasoned participant here, I haven’t tried over there yet.
By rmast 2026-03-090:29 That looks interesting, but I feel like it’s likely to be close to impossible to join. Feels like it would be weird asking someone you know for an invite.
I've wanted to join lobste.rs for several years but don't see any way to do so. I think that might be a bit too far in the other direction.
Same here, I don't know anyone who might send me an invite unfortunately. It's unlikely for this topic to come up organically in a conversation as in "hey by the way are you on lobste.rs" so my previous attempts were by sending messages in my company's notice board asking if someone is there. But in the last few years I have worked in smaller startups so the sample size is too small for this strategy to succeed.
By ajdecon 2026-03-090:48 FWIW, folks on lobste.rs are (mostly) friendly and willing to extend invites if you seem like a real person. My understanding is that the invite system is primarily in use to avoid drive-by spammers and the like.
Feel free to send me an email (findable via my HN profile) mentioning that you found it via this thread, and I’m happy to extend an invite.
By lagrange77 2026-03-090:151 reply Wow, i just noticed, that they block access from Brave Browser.
By shagie 2026-03-093:54 What's up with Lobste.rs blocking the Brave browser? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42353473 (93 comments, and linking to https://lobste.rs/s/iopw1d/what_s_up_with_lobste_rs_blocking... which is about that, though if you browse with Brave you might have trouble with it)
By kristopolous 2026-03-091:26 I think we've gone from the eternal September to the eternal December
Perhaps more proof of work is necessary, but it makes me sad.
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.
By Vachyas 2026-03-0912:24 Somehow I've been browsing HN since ~2019 without ever wanting to reply so much that I was willing to make an account (and start receiving emails, etc) but your comment made me curious how easy it could be, and wow. Now I have an account.
I kind of assumed it was hard to make an account (maybe even an invite-only situation) based purely off of how unique most handles were, and how well curated/moderated everything was. So I guess you could say, the quality of the usernames and the quality of the posts :)
By brudgers 2026-03-0822:12 My intuition is increasing the difficulty of account creation favors motivated actors and disincentivizes organic participation because:
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.
By HendrikHensen 2026-03-0821:118 reply I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.
By 7777332215 2026-03-0821:54 Same, though I'm also surprised how easy I can make new accounts for this site. But I love that. Hope it doesn't require me to jump through a bunch of hoops in the future.
I think yours might be extreme. But I think the anonymity here is widely appreciated. And frankly necessarily relies on easy creation of accounts.
People share things that they often wouldn’t. And somehow the culture remains mostly civil. It’s a pretty fantastic forum IMHO.
Changing the rules would surely change the vibe, so to speak.
By imglorp 2026-03-0821:22 I appreciate the anonymity. Posting as throwaway is often useful to distance the poster from $work or $ex or other situations yet contribute to a conversation.
But will it continue under all the login id surveillance laws coming up?
You are aware of the guidelines? (You are not fostering community)
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
By i_think_so 2026-03-097:52 Technically, every HN account is a throw-away account. ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20260228135203/https://www.brain...
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/351103
https://web.archive.org/web/20250713080832/https://www.usmcm...
By HendrikHensen 2026-03-098:47 Thanks, I was not aware. They seem to be guidelines, and not rules. I find my privacy and the prevention of anyone to build a full profile of me (especially how easy that is now in the age of LLMs) a bit more important than the vague concept of "fostering community". I am sorry.
By deaux 2026-03-094:15 Just like how HN itself can't be immune from macro trends, neither can its users, and macro trends have unfortunately made this a necessity for many of them.
I think the problem is you can be tracked by your email when you sign up for a new account. So I am not sure how this can be helpful.
This matters when you're hiding from the website. It doesn't matter if you're just trying to hide such things from the public.
By AnimalMuppet 2026-03-0823:09 It also matters if you're trying to hide from subpoenas to the website.
By usr1106 2026-03-0823:14 My HN account has no email. Not sure whether it would still be possible for a new account.
By HendrikHensen 2026-03-098:48 On Reddit and Hacker News, I don't need an email address to sign up. But also I use SimpleLogin to have a separate email address per website/account. Quite necessary these days when personal data is leaked by some company or other every day.
> not too much of my post history accumulates in one account
I'm curious to hear what benefits you think can be gained from avoiding this.
By boredatoms 2026-03-0821:24 I do the same. It simply means theres less accidental leakage / self-doxing that could be pieced together if you (or llm) read every comment on the account.
Suggestion: Pick a long term account, dump the comments, and see what an llm could figure out about the target
By idontwantthis 2026-03-0821:241 reply I do it sometimes just to restrict my own pride in the account. I get a buzz from upvotes and that upsets me on a deeper level.
By bitroughj 2026-03-0822:13 Same, but also for the opposite reason: a new account gives me a chance to do better. If I post lame comments, I accept the lameness of the posts attached to a particular user name and the hesitation I feel to post more lame comments decreases. With a fresh identity, I am more likely to avoid lame posting sort of like how you avoid going out in the mud in brand new sneakers. A sort of repentance; being born again in the digital realm.
By HendrikHensen 2026-03-098:50 You can build quite an extensive profile of someone given enough post history. More post history means more details. Especially nowadays with LLMs it's trivial. This can lead to all sorts of issues. One is people I know in real life being able to identify me. Another is that through various means my account may be linked to my personal identity (e.g. through matching usernames or emails across platforms) and oppressive regimes (now or in the feature) may use my post history to take action against me.
By i_think_so 2026-03-097:25 Your behavior is only an outlier because we don't teach kids basic security practices and so they don't grow up into adults who think like that. We also don't teach kids how to avoid "Internet addiction" dopamine chasing, so seeing a number (eg: karma score) get smaller instead of bigger hurts feefees.
I'm well aware that the cyberlibertarian ethos endemic here opposes any form of regulation. But when the status quo clearly isn't working something has to change. Parent's have failed to step up and do their jobs. Somebody else has to.
By BobbyJo 2026-03-091:33 Honestly, it's probably good if platforms disincentivize this. If you know creating a new account is high friction, you are more likely to take care of the account you have, and be a higher quality member.
If you intend your accounts to be thrown away, you will likely behave worse.
*I'm using "you" generically, I don't mean you specifically.
By Bombthecat 2026-03-0821:282 reply Reddit didn't ban you? I got banned for that lmao
By johnnyanmac 2026-03-0821:30 Never got banned for it, though my "rotations" tend to be "a few weeks every year".
even if they did ban me: the account was going to be deleted in a short while regardless. So that fear isn't present for what's essentially a longer lasting throwaway.
By HendrikHensen 2026-03-098:52 Reddit didn't (yet). Another tech focused community site did though... So I stopped participating in the community.
By rock_artist 2026-03-0820:551 reply I really don’t like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work makes sense more than limiting new users.
By trinsic2 2026-03-0821:49 What would this proof of work scenario, instead of restricting new user content, look like?
By apt-apt-apt-apt 2026-03-0821:511 reply I was going to suggest emotional leetcode, but LLMs do well on this.
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).
By II2II 2026-03-0822:19 That type of question could also turn people off. We already have too many discussions where people are quick to jump to conclusions and attribute intent, rather than asking basic questions.
By TZubiri 2026-03-0821:00 Seems to be a general problem right?
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.
By ls-a 2026-03-0822:53 Wow! I might be witnessing the end of HN
By nottorp 2026-03-097:06 But is there a connection between the front page being full of "AI" slop and "AI" worship and these new accounts? Or are the old timers also upvoting those submissions in the detriment of other, more interesting topics?
By whh 2026-03-0821:47 I echo this sentiment for all social media platforms today...
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.
By knowitnone3 2026-03-0823:58 [dead]
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."
By dang 2026-03-1518:03 That's because it's not primarily a technical task. If we specified technical criteria X, Y, Z, all that would happen is they'd end up on an LLM checklist somewhere.
What's needed is to get to know this place a little and how it operates, which means taking the time to poke around and explore. I realize HN is rather cryptic at first, but it doesn't take that long for one's eyes to adjust.
By TheChelsUK 2026-03-1120:541 reply 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.
By dang 2026-03-125:26 What you're describing is legit. I think the solution here is to understand that the rules are never fully specified, and not all-or-nothing. At such a general level of abstraction, it can't be.
More here in case useful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342616
By AlexeyBrin 2026-03-0821:022 reply 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.
By conductr 2026-03-0823:04 That works for me so long as it’s not the main solution, as I personally don’t want to curate, I’d rather just partake in a sanely moderated forum and that’s my understanding of what HN has been it’s just facing a new challenge with ai spam
By inquirerGeneral 2026-03-0821:55 [dead]
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.
The problem is that there are now so many attempts to get "real quality feedback" that the entire system is in danger of collapsing. Imagine how you'd feel if Gemini pointed the rest of the internet at your inbox! Or a thousand people showed up in your garden, all wanting your attention. This isn't so far from that; HN is not so big a place, and there are only two of us supporting it.
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".
By mursu 2026-03-1023:03 Thank you.I see your point and I understand what I must do. I will stick around and try to naturally blend in. This place seems a bit misterious and I weirdly feel drawn to it the more I read... even if that was not the primary goal for me here. I clearly had a slightly distorted idea about how this works. I'm glad and thankful for your feedback
By pinkmuffinere 2026-03-0822:592 reply 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'.
It'd be pretty easy to spot too, because most people don’t even bother trying to hide it (either out of laziness and/or ineptitude).
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.
By pinkmuffinere 2026-03-094:28 Oooooh that’s a great idea!
By 3tdimhcsb 2026-03-0916:18 [dead]
I'm wary about new accounts such as yours wanting to censor and shape discourse by antagonizing people who hold diverse views that differ from your own here.
The HN culture has shifted drastically over the past 5 years.
By ropable 2026-03-0823:59 "New account". Meanwhile, the account is 4.5 years old with 2600 karma and has hundreds of thoughtful comments.
By pinkmuffinere 2026-03-0823:08 To be clear, I wouldn't filter people just because they have different views than me (the goal is to automate the detection, to avoid the effort of reading all the comments -- I should mostly not be in the loop). But I have come across accounts that openly admit to being sock-puppets (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242156). These sorts of accounts I would highlight.
Likewise for guideline-abusers. I don't really know what heuristic you would use to detect rules abuse, but I imagine there are at least some clear violations that could be detected.
Finally, I think I'd make one account for sock-puppets, another for guidelines-abusers, etc, so people can 'subscribe' to whatever degree of 'highlighting' that they want.
By QuantumGood 2026-03-0823:062 reply user: pinkmuffinere
created: August 8, 2021
karma: 2686
Just new ones for now.
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.
By wormpilled 2026-03-0820:101 reply It's really hurting the brand. I can't remember the last time I bothered to even check that index. I used to check it all the time.
/newest is pretty grim, too. Go there and click any link, and odds are you won't even need to read the contents to know it's AI generated, because you'll immediately be met by one of:
- A landing page that looks exactly like every single AI generated landing page ever, I don't even need to describe it, you already know what it looks like
- An article or blog post headered by an image with the Gemini logo in the corner
- A Github repository with CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md and/or 50 large commits made in the span of a day
I'd estimate that more than half of new submissions now fall into one of the above categories.
By mbernstein 2026-03-0821:131 reply There's almost no shot to get hand authored posts some views (I tried with one of mine recently). I felt like I submitted it and a moment later there were like 20 new very obviously AI generated posts ahead of it.
By rubb3rDucc 2026-03-0822:24 I recently had the same experience with a Show HN thread I posted.
By verdverm 2026-03-0821:32 It does seem, anecdotally, that the Show HN is being used less since the recent analytic posts that made it to the front page.
By techsystems 2026-03-0820:44 How new is new?
By kazinator 2026-03-095:00 A site can't easily be immune to macro trends in authentic dicussion, but it can be significantly immune to inauthentic uses.
By xupybd 2026-03-0821:07 That's sad there have been some really neat things shared that way but you gotta do what ya gotta do.
By Tacite 2026-03-1120:41 By swat535 2026-03-0823:28 Why not let the users choose at settings? like "Show dead" ?
By jakejmnz 2026-03-1023:25 Yep, just tried to post and I'm not able. Unfortunate. :/
By karmakaze 2026-03-091:09 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.
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...
By dang 2026-03-133:44 I doubt that people would respect it, so we'd still have the problem of distinguishing wheat from chaff in the 'human' section, plus also have a 'bot' bucket to maintain.
By mancerayder 2026-03-091:58 Minimum karma perhaps?
It's easy for people to game but it's at least one more effort-based hurdle.
By rvz 2026-03-091:31 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.
By aaron695 2026-03-091:10 [dead]
By ludicrousdispla 2026-03-0820:09 [flagged]
By 1tdimhcsb 2026-03-0912:04 [flagged]
By AussieWog93 2026-03-0822:5310 reply Reddit has tried this approach and, IMO, it's failed.
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?
By stuartjohnson12 2026-03-0823:113 reply 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.
By spartanatreyu 2026-03-0823:201 reply > 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.
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.
By scoofy 2026-03-0823:31 I quit moderating because it was destroying my mental health.
Getting called a fascist and rehashing how “no, you’re libertarian politics are fine, but can you please just start your own sub” in a long, drawn out, hateful, back and forth gets exhausting after the 200th person who comes to the bicycling subreddit and feels they should be allowed to endorse harming cyclists with their vehicles.
Everyone got mad at spez for having the audacity to fuck with these kids, and there is a point there, but after living with it, I could see myself doing the same damn thing.
By qingcharles 2026-03-093:501 reply Moderating Reddit subs can be a huge money maker. I know people making $100K/year from it. There are cabals, especially in the adult sections. Reddit has tried to address this recently by limiting the number of subs a person can moderate, but that just causes these big accounts to create more user accounts and split all their subs up that way.
By anonzzzies 2026-03-094:353 reply I must be old and naive but you can make money with subreddits?
By qingcharles 2026-03-0915:45 On the adult subs, at least, menu links, sidebar links and banner ads, automod reply links, and by limiting your sub to only paying guests or your own managed models.
Plenty of subs blatantly allow certain brands to advertise while banning anyone else. Kind of amazed Reddit themselves haven’t put more effort into to stopping it since it kinda sidesteps their in house advertising.
By saltyoldman 2026-03-0922:03 Because said 100k'er are probably paying off someone inside reddit. Remember when Ebay sent some couple bloody pigs masks? Yeah evil people work at companies.
By cik 2026-03-096:39 At scale they will. For now, someone else puts the effort into growth marketing, eyeball capture. Reddit eventually changes the rules, seizing control, thereby acquiring users for less human cost (as opposed to missed revenue opportunity).
By phito 2026-03-096:13 Corruption
By mschuster91 2026-03-090:26 > 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.
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.
By onionisafruit 2026-03-093:231 reply 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.
By qingcharles 2026-03-093:46 It's even worse than that. They preemptively ban you outright on lots of major subs for posting on other subs. For instance, I can't interact with r/pics because I once commented on r/redditachievements. And a housemate once upvoted a pic on there which got us both banned for a week because Reddit thought I was trying to do a run-around on the ban.
I still love Reddit for all its flaws though.
Yeah, basically my experience right now. Been a software engineer for fifteen years, working on a project for five months, very excited about it. Go to post it here, and I'm met with: "We're temporarily restricting Show HNs."
No information about what threshold I need to cross, what the requirements are, what I need to do to post my project.
Very cool.
By dang 2026-03-1517:59 https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim contains such information. It's vague, I know, but that's because we want people to be genuine community members, which is not a checklist process.
By greazy 2026-03-0823:18 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.
By admiralrohan 2026-03-095:09 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.
By throwaway2037 2026-03-093:481 reply Same. Not DIY, but my first post was rejected and I was banned. LOL. I guess that is moderation in action!
By dxdm 2026-03-099:32 "excessive moderation" is a fun concept to think about.
By a456463 2026-03-1018:08 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
By realaaa 2026-03-100:57 100% 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
By nurettin 2026-03-095:16 > 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.
By Justkog 2026-03-0917:09 you are indeed describing my reddit experience, hence why I did not participate there while being a human
By alabhyajindal 2026-03-0820:015 reply 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.
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?
By heavyset_go 2026-03-093:38 > 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
By clbrmbr 2026-03-1019:45 Here to say I'm one of those people who did my first Show HN recently, and it was 100% due to the lowered activation energy to build something awesome with Claude. Not 45min, but took about 6 hours of my time, and benefitted from testing against a 10yr old firmware codebase at my startup.
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.
By ex-aws-dude 2026-03-0823:361 reply Someone telling you about their AI created project is like someone telling you their dream they had last night.
By basilikum 2026-03-0914:55 Don't be so hard on dreams. They are a creative work of a humans subconsciousness.
By wolvoleo 2026-03-0822:05 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.
By 113 2026-03-0919:18 > 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.
By bschmidt25 2026-03-0821:042 reply [flagged]
By kstrauser 2026-03-0821:41 Why do you keep posting here? Asking seriously. You open a new account, immediately get it banned, then move on to the next. Doesn’t that get boring?
For your first ever comment, you are breaking multiple rules.
Please review the Guidelines and FAQ
By bschmidt100 2026-03-091:45 [dead]
