- I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user" feature that didn't rely on vibe-coding my own Chrome extension (and thus not work on Safari where I spent at least 50% of my HN time). I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory.
I've also noticed that very obviously LLM-generated comments are called out, and the community tends to agree, but those that have any plausible deniability are given far too much leniency, and people will over-index on the guidelines to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don't think a captcha is the solution, as it'll degrade conversation by an OOM though.
- Captcha is only effective at annoying legitimate users. If there is any incentive to do so, bots have no problem bypassing/solving them.
by 1970-01-01
2 subcomments
- Posts like this should just implement the poll feature. You'll have your answer in 24h. Then go and quibble with your data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
by loveparade
0 subcomment
- Captcha is a completely useless system trivially solved by many agents and services. The only thing captcha does is annoy humans. I do agree with the problem, but I don't know what a solution would look like outside of government identification.
- Interesting question but my problem is... it sometimes feels like there are almost no users on this site to begin with, real or not! This post only has around 100 comments, and even a top page post around 1500. Reddit's front page posts have thousands of comments and for me they seem pretty readable (and we know there are plenty of bots there... but Reddit does use captchas a bit I guess). I guess I am focused on a different problem though of how to attract more good human content...
- The value of an HN post or comment that people actually see is so much higher than the value of a CAPTCHA-solve that there's no point in even talking about this.
- I explored a startup idea that really didn't make sense unless there was a way to ensure users were unique humans in an anonymous and privacy preserving way.
Researched it substantially and realized it's an unsolved problem. Anything that makes a dent is incomplete and comes with ugly tradeoffs. For a time I wondered if I should try and solve it myself, but I could never think any solution that hadn't already been/being tried. Years later I'm left curious if it's even possible to solve the problem.
My point is that captcha won't solve this, and solving this problem is a lot harder than it seems at first, and might not even be solvable (which I know is hard to accept).
If someone does find an elegant privacy ensuring way to solve it, I think the impact would extend far beyond HN and could make a big difference to the future of civilization as a whole.
by vjxhgtiuyy
0 subcomment
- Yes really
- This won't work, HN is a high enough value target (Not a random site where bots try to spam some guestbook) that people would adapt to that quickly. Headless browsers, browser extensions, outsourcing captcha solving etc. - there's too many ways to do that if you are determined unless you want to also throw captchas at regular users for every action.
by chasebank
3 subcomments
- We've always wanted to build a service which provides authentication through credit score verification. Whether its applied to dating apps, product review sites, HN. I'd sure love to filter by 650+ only. I'm certain it's illegal but it sure would help.
by vivzkestrel
1 subcomments
- - here is an idea for a captcha
- write this number in words
- 486436546497964136564768756456455824164567575646875812445676854253154782125
- four quadrigintilion eight hundred sixty four trigintillion three hundred sixty five duovigintillion four hundred sixty four unvigintillion nine hundred seventy nine vigintillion six hundred forty one novemdecillion three hundred sixty five octodecillion six hundred forty seven septendecillion six hundred eight seven sexdecillion five hundred sixty four quindecillion five hundred sixty four quatuordecillion five hundred fifty eight tredecillion two hundred forty one duodecillion six hundred forty five undecillion six hundred seventy five decillion seven hundred fifty six nonillion four hundred sixty eight octillion seven hundred fifty eight septillion one hundred twenty four sextillion four hundred fifty six quintillion seven hundred sixty eight quadrillion five hundred forty two trillion five hundred thirty one billion five hundred forty seven million eight two thousand one hundred twenty five
by notepad0x90
0 subcomment
- There is already a captcha when you create accounts.
There is no high-volume spam (ai or otherwise) on HN, so captcha won't help, low volume captcha can be farmed out. Humans are the best defense against low-volume spam. So flag these posts!
- I’m not convinced CAPTCHA is the right long-term solution anymore.
Most low-effort bots can already bypass basic CAPTCHA, while it mostly adds friction for legitimate users. HN’s strength is the quality of discussion, and that seems better protected by behavior-based signals (account age, posting patterns, community feedback) rather than one-time verification challenges.
- HN already enforces ReCAPTCHA for registrations. More CAPTCHAs will not do much if anything to improve.
- This is evolution in action. An ecosystem is generating with different things populating it. Is there a better method than captcha out there? For instance, hide things in html comments that only bots would see and if they are reacted to then flag that as a bot account and silently hide their comments (so that another account isn't created)? Do this randomly so that it is hard to find but bot code would catch it. Or other things like text with the same background color so only a bot could have seen it. Basically, instead of staying defensive, go on the attack?
by crazygringo
0 subcomment
- > there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads
Is there? I enable showdead and don't see it. There are the occasional spam and vulgar comments, but not that much.
Any "AI slop" being posted seems to come from actual HN'ers who think they're being helpful, and is often downvoted. But there's not much.
So I'm not sure this is a problem that currently needs any new solutions? I don't see AI bots taking over the discourse at all. Not even a little.
by disambiguation
0 subcomment
- Its too bad Team Blind doesn't support a dev api to their auth service. Work emails are a good candidate for a simple "blue check mark" system for the HN crowd, but with a layer preserving anonymity. Ex. Generate a token, add to profile, browser extension performs verification.
Otherwise agreed with the sentiment.
by kevinh456
1 subcomments
- Captchas are not effective. You can pay 2captcha less than a penny per captcha and humans solve them for you.
- I just realised that one day, an AI moderated board will receive such a post from an AI, not a human. And then a captcha only an AI can solve will appear, and the board will be rid of all "human slop"
- This wouldn't solve anything.
To see what I mean, take a screenshot of a random captcha that needs solving and ask an LLM to solve it for you. It will do it accurately.
by estimator7292
0 subcomment
- I think you should first ask if captchas are at all effective at stopping bots.
(They are not and haven't been for a long, long time)
- Do you have some examples of ai slop posts?
There are quite a few third party apps for Hacker News, such as Hacki (ios/android). [1]
Something like using a third party app that includes forms of spam filtering like checking when the user joined, how many posts they have, amount of 'karma' (or whatever it's called here). You could implement blocking individual users & etc etc. This app does not have that but it could be forked and modified or talk to the dev...
That might be a better solution than trying to implement all types of annoying captchas & other extremely annoying checks on HN's side.
[1] https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki
- What's wrong with simple categories for comments... Informative, Funny, Flamebait, etc.
- Suggesting this in 2025 is wild
- Seeing "is this a bike?" captchas on a forum like this one would mean that the web is well and truly dead. Bring it on, for all intents and purposes, and 2fa also, while we're at it.
- > "there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads"
Do you have some examples of this? I am on HN almost every day, and I read a lot of comments, and I haven't noticed this
- I've been thinking the same. I'm actually building a little site that presents a textarea that you can type your comment into and it will track its changes over time (typing, editing, pasting, etc) and provide a little playback widget so someone can see the composition of the comment. The idea being you can include a link to the playback in your comment that you post here and someone can eyeball it and see if it looks like you really spent some time writing it, vs just pasting in LLM slop. Of course, a sophisticated agent could _simulate_ writing the comment, but I think it could still help in general.
- i dont know
- Is complaining about the rise of AI Slop itself a sub-category of AI Slop?
- no.
- IMO, the old guard are all-in on the glorious slop future. We will eventually need to seek refuge in human-only and invite-only spaces as the infinite slop tide consumes all public spaces.
- [dead]
- [flagged]
- [flagged]
by raw_anon_1111
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by pepperball
1 subcomments
- [flagged]
- That is a losing battle.
Even if you manage to make bot usage more expensive, which is all a captcha can do, the content posted by humans in discussions and shared links is increasingly generated by machines.
It's ironic having a community of people object to the same technology they helped build. Enjoy the show, and learn to live with it. It's going to get much worse before it gets any better, if at all.
- NO
"Me furiously trying to decide what a EURO thinks a motorcycle is" for 60s
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