Hey, I just signed up. Give me some time and the thought of chatting to an LLM will become more appealing.

What was that new benchmark recently that no LLM could pass? Pull it up, wrap into a captcha service, apply for a YC funding round.

I think this sort of gatekeeping while understandable, really limits new users that have just learnt about this forum and wanted to accomplish the thing they were here for a reason - case and point - myself - just got here - want to post something on showHN.. and was blocked. Forced engagement through strict gatekeeping

The argument against it is that it's futile. Banning new accounts will lead to stagnation and stop bot accounts but people will simply filter their own comments through an LLM, either to avoid steganography or to maximize their compliance with the guidelines and potential karma. Eventually they'll just have an agent comment for them because that's the best way to maximize their utility of the forum. All of the posted articles will either be written by AI or will be about AI. All Show HNs will be vibe coded. This will happen because it's what an increasing number of people on HN want to normalize.

The fact is the ethos of this forum has become antithetical to what hacker culture and tech have become, which is incurious, misanthropic and aggressively pro AI. That isn't a problem that can be solved with engineering, it's existential. Either the culture changes or HN does, and as HN's whole thing is "avoiding the Eternal September at all costs," which reduces to "avoiding cultural change at all cost," HN can't change and survive. Immovable object versus irresistable force.

I guess the only advice I have is to stop using HN whenever it becomes useless to you and find greener pastures. The Fediverse is still good.

Not a terrible idea, but what's the exit plan? "Eventually someone will code something to stop them"?

[dead]