I'm not arguing that this is a good solution. But our user experience is being increasingly disrupted by squinting at comments and trying to parse their syntactic and semantic structure to discern if this account is a person or not. That is not what this place should be, and I think that is something we all agree on.
A new account ban sounds rash and I agree that this could be a really dumb idea. I'm also certain dang et al will have considered it amongst other approaches. But this place is becoming less compelling by the day, and at least this measure plugs the holes until there is a strategy in place to address the issue of bots and agents being able to create accounts and spam and shill the ever-living fuck out of this once great site.
Why even is there an urgency for new users? Especially given that many now are guaranteed to be undetectable bots, which goes against the ethos of the site. What is the argument against pausing new accounts, when this community is already fairly large and active?
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.
The very few humans on the planet able to solve this will be blocked and will have to use another manual process that would slow them but every LLM would successfully fail.
I'd be happy to pay the 61¢ per account it currently costs to mail a postcard if it means a massive improvement in anti-bot bs.
Which is against the rules, that you chose to not read?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
Further, the guidelines have long stated not to use HN primarily for self promotion. First, try being part of the community and understanding how things work here. Coming here to "accomplish" showing off your project is faux pas.
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.