[mikenew]

This feels like an existential threat to HN, and to the general concept of anonymous online discourse. Trust in the platform is foundational, and without it the whole thing falls down.

Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is. And even then, you'll still have people handing their account over to an LLM.

I really struggle to imagine a way around it. It could be that the future is just smaller, closed groups of people you know or know indirectly.

[dom96]

> Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is

Same. I agree that it is unappealing but it can be done in a way that respects anonymity.

I built this and talk about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

I think we’re on the precipice of this being a requirement to have any faith you’re talking to another human. As a side effect it also helps avoid state actors from influencing others.

[MaKey]

> I think we’re on the precipice of this being a requirement to have any faith you’re talking to another human.

Except that it doesn't prove you're talking to a human - it just increases the hurdles for bot operators (buy or steal verified accounts).

[jeff-hykin]

There's lots of alternatives. Others have mentioned invites and proof of work, and I'll mention a third alternative: a voucher system.

E.g. I make a new hackernews account, and say "just ask wikipedia, they will vouch for my new hackernews account". Then wikipedia checks if any of their accounts vouch for this new hackernews account. If a user with enough reputation on Wikipedia (e.g. your friends or one of your own wikipedia accounts) vouches for this new hackernews account then wikipedia tells hackernews "yes, that account is legit".

Hackernews knows the minimum amount possible about the new account. And while wikipedia knows something, they know WAY LESS than a full ID check. People can have multiple Wikipedia accounts.

And its a two way street; Wikipeida could ask hackernews about new accounts. Both sites would benefit from the collaboration.

Karma could actually become meaningful/useful for reputation checks.

The only unfortunate aspect is I'm not aware of any software tooling for such a system.

[pluralmonad]

Removing anonymity is not a solution, just a different problem.

[neom]

I don't feel like using HN anymore, I hope the just add invites, last time I said this someone replied it's just the same as some other site then, but it's not... hn is hn...this situation is really bumming me out.

[nomel]

Looks like http://lobste.rs is it. I haven't been invited, and I' not really sure I should be, but I'm having a very nice time just reading.

[kanzure]

Another option instead of using identity is to use proof of work or hashcash such that anyone who thinks a comment is valuable can use some hash rate to upvote it. It doesn't matter how the content was generated, only that someone thought it was important, and you can independently verify this by checking how much hash effort went into hashing for that comment. This also does not require any identity either.

[Borealid]

Advertisers are more willing to spend money to promote content than an individual is willing to do the same...

[zug_zug]

I don't think that's true at all.

One of the things HN does is not let you interact in certain ways until you've earned sufficient karma. This is a basic proof-of-work. If your bot can't average a positive karma, then it'll never get certain privileges.

Not to say the system is perfectly tuned for bots, because it's not. The point is that proof of identity is not the only option.

[3rodents]

HN is almost entirely about the comments. Voting is useful as a tool for loosely sorting content but otherwise, HN could easily do without it. Some of the most valuable comments come from people with barely any karma. And that’s why HN is great! The restrictions on voting and flagging for new users could be removed without impacting the quality of HN. I can’t imagine any scenario in which HN’s current system could survive the same slopification that is happening on reddit.

HN is doing okay at the moment because nobody is yet publishing ebooks and videos on how to astroturf HN to launch your SaaS. Unfortunately, Reddit hasn’t escaped that fate.

[rob]

They get the privilege of immediately polluting the website with LLM-generated comments.

Many of them sound and look completely normal and have others on here interacting with them. They don't use em dashes, sometimes they'll use all lowercase text, sometimes the owner of the bot will come out and start commenting to throw you off.

All examples I've witnessed here.

HN should immediately start implementing at least some basic bot detection methods without requiring us to email them every time. I've discovered multiple bots make detailed comments within 30 seconds of each other in different threads, something a normal human wouldn't be able to do. That should be at least flagging the account for review. Obviously they'll get smarter and not do that soon but it would help in the short term.

I'd say it's not an issue but everything I described above has happened in less than a month and every day now I'm discovering bots here.

[hhjinks]

Prevent pasting comments. Implement a naive check for time spent typing the comment, and shadowban posts that don't pass the criteria. Add a 1 minute wait and captcha for posting.

That'd drastically reduce the amount of low effort posts, both human-written and generated.

[satiric]

Preventing pasting would drastically reduce how often people cite their sources; no one wants to hand copy a long url.

[ttamslam]

I've been working on this tool to address this same issue in other communities: https://www.ityped.it/

It's certainly not perfect, but similar to what you mention.

p: https://www.ityped.it/p/WIiTYfdxQ5ww

[krapp]

Have the output of the LLM sent to a headless browser that "types" and submits the comment as necessary, with some randomness added for authenticity.

Or, since this would need to be done in javascript, just block or rewrite the javascript and fake the output in the sent request.

Simplistic solutions like this stopped being meaningful decades ago.

[nottorp]

> And even then, you'll still have people handing their account over to an LLM.

Exactly. So what's proof of identity good for?

[nomel]

Invitation only is a reasonably successful alternative for niche communities, especially with the ability to banish an invite "tree".

My conspiracy theory: Campaign money, from the last few elections (I think "Correct the record" [1] was the first "disclosed" push), resulted in a bunch of bot accounts being made/bought all across social media. These are being lightly used to maintained some reasonably realistic usage statistics, and are "activated" to respond to key political topics/times. This is on top of spam accounts to push products and, of course, the probably higher-than-average bot number of accounts, made for fun, by HN users.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

[AndyKelley]

invitation tree. lobste.rs already has it, works great.