alt Hacker NewsI'd suggest: new accounts are read-only for at least a week. Then they can comment (rate limited at first, gradually relaxed) and vote, and then after some additional amount of time and/or karma they can submit a post. Maybe some of these mechanisms are already in place? Bots can probably game this too but drive-by bots maybe won't be patient enough.
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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 :(
Requiring accounts to be a certain age does not help and will only affect legitimate users. The slopsters will simply create accounts, wait a bit and start posting then.
Actually cross the will out. They are already doing this to avoid the green smell. This account replied to me today. 4 months old, but only started posting today. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BelVisgarra
Oh damn, that's the one who posted the AskHN about the verified job portal on the frontpage today. Either this is some chilling still in build up, or it's an actual human being with severe LLM slop impersonation derangement syndrome.
If most people are like my on that topic, then they use HN without an account, until they want to post or comment something, then they try to find out how to create an account. If they won't be able to post or comment then, then they will just not create or retain that account.
I was able to have discussions where one party has significantly unpopular opinions. Such discussions are unique to HN, please don't kill them.
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Immediate comment privileges are really important. Lots of examples, but to give a silly one, someone pastes their clipboard without realizing it includes their API key or their email. Good Samaritans should be able to say, "Hey, I just caught something."
And, as another commenter mentions, if someone shares your work, you should be able to comment on that thread without delay.