Hacker News Reader

Humans have had an easy time for a while. Good to finally see some competition. :)

On the other hand, why is that we insist on humanity? None of the systems can block a captcha-solving team based in Nigeria. What we need to block is bad behavior by users and not their humanity.

View on HN

Good point. I imagine that detecting such behavior will also be pretty difficult. It's one thing in a forum, where you'd maybe want to discriminate against idiots (but that would still leave you open to the problem of shills/sock puppets). But for big companies like Google, would they really want to open that can of worms?

Of course, there's a quite relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

I think a big problem is Sybil attacks. Let's suppose I make a bot that posts thousands of reports of my computer crashing after using product X. To determine if such a post is bad behavior or not, you have to know if the claim is genuine. That can't be determined by the content of the post itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com