alt Hacker NewsReddit has tried this approach and, IMO, it's failed.
A new human user will spend actual time creating a thoughtful and helpful post, only to be greeted by "sorry, your post has been removed by automod because you don't meet criteria". They get disheartened and walk away forever.
The spammers, on the other hand, know how the rules work and so will just build their bots to work around this (waiting 30days, farming karma).
The net result is that these rules ensure that much greater proportion of new accounts come from bad actors - who else would jump through hoops just to participate on a web forum?
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It’s worse than that. On r/news they shadow ban anybody who doesn’t have verified email. No message or anything. Just nobody sees your comments. I probably made 20 or more comments there over a few months before I figured it out. It felt humiliating.
There needs to o be a distinction between creating a post and replying.
IMO New accounts should be restricted from creating new posts, or at least certain kinds of new posts.
Replying shouldn't be restricted. That is how users interact with each other and learn the etiquette of HN.
I agree. I faced this in the psychology subreddit, forced to quit. They wanted karma to post comments, but without posting comments, how am I supposed to get karma specific within that community?
Literally me on a DIY sub. I needed some advice, got auto removed, never went back.
> waiting 30days, farming karma
If "farming karma" is a thing, maybe that forum deserves what is coming. Either the karma mechanic is inappropriate given the demographic, or it is too hard for the users to avoid upvoting bots.
It failed on Reddit because Reddit is maintained by a bunch of volunteers to whom Reddit provides woefully, woefully, horrifically underdeveloped tooling to automate their communities in a more nuanced way. Hacker News has three advantages. First, it is moderated by the same people who build the tooling, so the incentives are aligned. Second, it is an enormous source of soft power for a venture capital firm with the resources, incentives, and likely the competence and capacity to keep it running smoothly. Third, the scale is smaller and is not tied to hardline revenue constraints like CPM, user LTV and DAU-maximization which restrict what Reddit can do.