The problem is that we might lose some gold.

Not too seldom have I seen the author or a significant party of a story chime in through a fresh green account, as they were alerted by the story being posted here one way or another. And usually when they do it's very interesting.

As such I would find it detrimental if they had to jump through too many hoops so they don't bother or it takes too long so the thread dies before they can participate.

Perhaps more proof of work is necessary, but it makes me sad.

I still remember creating my HN account. It stands out in my memory, because it was the smoothest, simplest, easiest, and quickest account creation of my life.

I had lurked here for around a decade before finally creating an account. Any urge to participate was thwarted by my resistance toward creating accounts (I just hate account creation for some reason). But HN's account creation process was a breath of fresh air. "You mean it can be this easy? Why isn't it this easy everywhere? If I had known how simple it was, I would have created an HN account years earlier, lol."

It was especially stunning to me, because I think the discourse on HN is generally of a higher quality than most other sites (which I wouldn't naturally associate with such an easy account creation process).

It's my only fond memory of account creation (along with maybe when I created an account on America-Online back in the 90s, since that was my first ever account and it was all so novel). Just a few quick seconds, and then I'm already commenting on HN. It was beautiful. I remain delighted.

My intuition is increasing the difficulty of account creation favors motivated actors and disincentivizes organic participation because:

1. ideological and/or economically motivated actors will just see it as a cost of doing business.

2. Ordinary sign-up friction is more likely to make HN appear ordinary to anyone who stumbles upon it.

3. Sign-up friction is a moat. The strength of HN is moderation of what gets in.

I rotate accounts on "social media" (mostly Reddit and Hacker News, the others don't interest me) every few weeks or months to make sure not too much of my post history accumulates in one account. I would dislike it very much if there would be high friction to create new accounts. On the other hand my behavior is probably a major outlier.

I really don’t like newbie has 0 trust. So some proof of work makes sense more than limiting new users.

I was going to suggest emotional leetcode, but LLMs do well on this.

When given a conversation about Alice and Suzy having a one-upmanship conversation (my husband rich, my kid is a genius) and what emotions they are feeling, and what Suzy could have said instead to improve the conversation, it gave accurate responses (e.g. they're feeling insecure, competitive, envy).

But is there a connection between the front page being full of "AI" slop and "AI" worship and these new accounts? Or are the old timers also upvoting those submissions in the detriment of other, more interesting topics?

Wow! I might be witnessing the end of HN

I echo this sentiment for all social media platforms today...

At least new accounts are more obvious here. This pattern has been increasingly used for scams, spam and AI slop on Instagram, X and Facebook for years.

Seems to be a general problem right?

The standard solution is using an email to register account, maybe a cloudflare captcha, and then using good network logging to group accounts by IPs and chainbanning abusive accounts when they are caught by other mechanisms.

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