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 :(
It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(
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.
We rely on friction for most of our social norms.
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.
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.
The main subreddits will basically shadowban you until your account is aged and has more than X karma.
There are a lot of flaws, though. Their appeal system is very broken, for instance.
Reddit hasn't been as overrun by bots yet, for the most part, although how long they can hold out I don't know.