Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?

85•Rooster61•23h ago

First off, this thread is NOT a petition to rally against the moderation team. Considering the deluge of trash they deal with every day, I think they are doing a valiant job and are to be commended. Consider it merely a place to discuss, which is what HN does best.

That said, it's becoming more and more obvious every day that there is a tremendous amount of attempts by bots, and specifically AI agents, to inject slop into HN threads. I worry about the integrity of the discourse here and if the ever growing wave of garbage will overtake staff resources to deal with it. Is it time to implement captcha for HN? If so, should it be out of the box, or a new mechanism more tailored to the security and privacy-centric nature of the HN readership? Are captchas even still effective enough in the age of AI to warrant their use?

Comments

chaps•22h ago

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.

rfw300•22h ago

"Captcha" doesn't refer to any specific type of puzzle, but a class of methods for verifying human users. Some older-style captchas are broken, but some newer ones are not.

bdcravens•22h ago

Since before LLMs were even an issue, there have been services that use overseas workers to solve them, with the going rate about $0.002 per captcha. (and they solve several different types)

gilrain•22h ago

This is both true and misleading. It implies captchas aren’t effective due to these services. In practice, though, a good captcha cuts a ton of garbage traffic even though a motivated opponent can pay for circumvention.

chaps•22h ago

I'm aware. But I'm also aware that breaking these sorts of systems is quite fun for a lot of nerds. So don't expect anything like that to last for any meaningful amount of time.

fyrn_•22h ago

It _would_ set the bar for a viable bot slightly higher. I'm not sure that's enough to justify it though.

losvedir•22h ago

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.

rd•22h ago

I don't know why more school districts don't force this for essays. It's so straightforward with Google doc editing history too. And yeah, sure, you can get around it if you _really_ want quite trivially, but I imagine it would solve for 99% of students, and force them to actually engage with whatever AI-generated stuff they inevitably type by hand more than they were before.

fyrn_•22h ago

Money is more focused on rolling out AI as fast as possible, rather than dealing with the side effects of that.

johnisgood•22h ago

I have no problems typing an essay out.

dizhn•22h ago

A generic playwright script taking agent's output as input could do this easily. Especially if it's just a few sites.

keyringlight•22h ago

One caveat, you might want to account for text that the writer deleted staying deleted/hidden. I'm not always the best at proofreading before submitting, but I'll often cut tangents I'm prone to ramble onto. Accidental pastes from other sources that are meant to stay private would be another issue if the history tracker grabs everything that goes into the text box.

rented_mule•17h ago

My favorite code editor is where I write anything longer than a sentence or two, including this comment. Then I paste the result into its final destination. Given that I tend to heavily edit my writing, the muscle memory I've built up in that editor helps me focus more deeply on my writing. So I guess I'll look pretty suspicious? Let me add an em-dash — everyone knows that real humans don't use those. ;-)

rd•22h ago

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.

ada0000•22h ago

+1. even blocking keywords could be nice, e.g. i don’t use AI for coding and don’t care much for news about claude code.

captcha would make it more of a hassle to post comments.

elashri•22h ago

I have a userscript that takes a list of keywords, domains and user names on HN. I host the json file containing the list on git instance and I use userscript plugin on iOS safari which would support this userscript. This is the lowest friction solution I found that would work on different devices.

I find HN much more tolerable this way.

SockThief•22h ago

That kind of feature would be welcome.

Blocking domains would be nice too. Like substack or medium. I'm happy to just ignore them, but it sure would be nice to filter them out if possible.

I get that it's complicating the system and keeping it simple is perhaps for the best.

ghssds•13h ago

Try Glider on F-Droid.

SockThief•3h ago

Great app! Thank you.

Anything you know that could help me on PC?

tptacek•22h ago

This is an anti-goal for HN. There are forums that silo themselves in various ways. HN is an experiment in how far you can get without any of those kinds of features, with a single global pool of conversations and participants. That's not to say there's no value in siloing, just that it's specifically not what HN is exploring.

lagniappe•22h ago

>There are forums that silo themselves in various ways. HN is an experiment in how far you can get without any of those kinds of features,

Normally I'd agree, but we have shadowbans, which really irks me.

tptacek•21h ago

Only for actual bad actors --- spammers, overt griefers, and people evading bans. A lot of HN's shadowban rep comes from Paul Graham's stewardship of the site (this whole site was a side-hustle of a side-hustle for him) and ignores over a decade of Dan's work professionalizing it.

Almost everyone banned on HN is banned publicly, with a public message explaining why.

lagniappe•21h ago

>Almost everyone banned on HN is banned publicly, with a public message explaining why.

I would love for this to be the case, however I quite extensively investigate this phenomenon and this does not match what I've seen. I'd like for us to be better than shadowbans. In some cases, I don't even get to vouch, it's just a comment that is banned-banned. It feels the worst when they're saying something substantive to the conversation and we have no means to surface the comment.

Some type of annual amnesty consideration or something of that nature is in order, or soon we'll recreate other echo chambers that are slowly fading out.

tptacek•21h ago

Every time I've looked into it, when you see suddenly and without reason ban-banned after a string of real comments, the backstory has been that it's someone with a track record under other usernames.

At some point, no matter what HN does, being comfortable with its moderation requires you to take Dan's word for things. I take his word for it on shadowbans.

Ironically, I'm irritated with moderation in the other direction: ten years of "if you keep breaking the guidelines under alternate accounts, we'll ban your real account" sort of makes my blood boil (people having long-running alts does that too), but I roll with it, because I couldn't do the job better than Dan and Tom do.

lagniappe•18h ago

>the backstory has been that it's someone with a track record under other usernames.

This has gaps, as you know, and doesn't wash. Let someone turn a new leaf. Amnesty puts a stop to this.

tptacek•17h ago

I don't think it does, no. I've seen people raise innuendo about this kind of thing for over 10 years and have never seen someone vindicated. Maybe you have an example you can share.

lossolo•20h ago

They're also shadow banning/silently disabling your votes, and they will not inform you about this. You think you're voting on stories or comments, but you aren't if they perceive your behavior as "upvote too many flamewar comments, culture-war/ideological battle comments, or otherwise low-quality comments for HN" and "if a user has a track record of upvoting comments that break the guidelines and/or downvoting good comments, or voting in ways that seem unfair – e.g., voting based on political side or personal acrimony, rather than on the objective merits of the comment itself".

tptacek•20h ago

This seems like an especially silly complaint on a site that is clear on the label about votes being just one of many signals deciding placement on pages and threads. We've known since 2008 that the HN experiment doesn't work if it runs off raw votes; you just get a front page full of memes.

lossolo•19h ago

If this were clearly public (like written in the rules) then maybe it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But if it isn't, it's good for people to know, so they understand how their voting habits can affect whether their votes count, right? That's why I mentioned it.

tptacek•18h ago

Perhaps you should acknowledge that your claim of them refusing to tell people about this is false.

lossolo•17h ago

That reply feels needlessly adversarial. I'm not claiming they "refuse to tell people", my point is that this isn't clearly documented in the public rules and, as far as I can tell, users aren't notified when it happens (nor is it something staff states proactively).

I only learned about it after I asked via a non-public channel, with evidence. Otherwise I wouldn't have known, and I suspect most users are unaware. What I cited in previous comment is also from a non-public conversations.

If I'm wrong and it's documented publicly in rules or users are notified when it happens to them, I'm happy to be corrected, link?

basilikum•16h ago

I've had submissions and comments of mine on this very account shadowbanned before I got some karma. It's just how the spam detection system works. So no, it's not just for bad actors, but for anyone an automated system suspects to be spammy enough. It's also easy to see whether your submission was shadowbanned by just looking for it while being logged out; only works if you know you might be shadowbanned though. So unsuspecting people who just got falsely flagged might never find out they are not being displayed to others.

caminante•21h ago

Preach it.

I'm still amazed at how Reddit weaponized the block feature.

If you block someone, you not only can't see their posts, but you ice them out from replying in the rest of the thread.

hananova•12h ago

I don’t really enjoy block systems myself, but that is what block has shifted to mean.

In the past “block” used to mean what “mute” means now: Hide from me. I believe it’s around the time Twitter became popular that the meaning has shifted to being a bi-directional mute.

I find that the need for a blocking system as that just points to a broken moderation system, and a broken society at large.

ktallett•22h ago

Do we have any users here that have such controversial or meme esque opnions that require blocking every single one?

pamcake•21h ago

Spammers plastering /new with self-promotion posts is a thing and filtering those out would be useful. I don't see how more CAPTCHAs would improve the over-all situation, on the other hand.

On the more benign side, maybe some people enjoy the musings of amichail on Ask but I could honestly do without.

ibejoeb•22h ago

I don't see a many habitual problem accounts. Do you? I guess there was the arguably special case of a certain OS enthusiast...

pepperball•21h ago

> I don't see a many habitual problem accounts.

It’s usually old/high karma accounts, as they can get away with it easier

pepperball•21h ago

> I don't see a many habitual problem accounts.

It’s usually old/high karma accounts, as they can get away with it easier. Throwaways that establish themselves for a time too, but those are usually dealt with eventually

tomashubelbauer•21h ago

An account doesn't have to be problematic for you to not want to see their comments. I have several handles in mind where I'd add them to such a list if it were a feature. Nothing against the people in particular, but sometimes when I see a handle (like others said, very often old accounts with high karma), I already know what they will go on about merely just based off the title of the submission and having unintentionally gleaned what topics they usually comment on just by being on HN for a while. It's a waste of time to read those comments, at least for me. Wouldn't hurt them if they lost my attention. I am not bothered by it enough to vibe code a browser extension for it, though. That threshold is a bit higher, I did it for blocking certain domains; there is only so many times I can sit through an article or an "essay" which should have been a podcast.

tptacek•18h ago

I disagree and would be hurt to lose your attention.

xnx•21h ago

Not sure what extensions work in Safari, but I think I used this one for awhile in Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10005699 / https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist

al_borland•19h ago

The problem with extensions on Safari is that they now need to go through the App Store. So you can’t just code it up and run it. It would require signing up for a developer account, paying $99/year, and all of that stuff.

You can run temporary unsigned extensions for development purposes, but they are removed after 24 hours or whenever you quit Safari, which would make using it daily a non-starter.

notherhack•21h ago

That extension already exists and works well. “Comments Owl for Hacker News”

swat535•19h ago

I don't think that kind of feature would be useful for HN.

The one thing I like about this place is that it's well moderated and you have shared opposing view points engaging (mostly) respectfully.

My personal and political views couldn't be further from most HN users (I'm both a Conservative _and_ a practicing Christian), yet I appreciate taking part in various discussion. I enjoy reading about point of views that directly challenge mine.

Let's keep HN respectful and accessible.

subsection1h•13h ago

> I'm both a Conservative _and_ a practicing Christian

But unlike most HN users who label themselves conservative Christians, you've never suggested that climate change is a hoax:

https://hn.algolia.com/?type=all&query=author:swat535+climat...

I don't ever want to consume information from people who are so illiterate that they believe that scientists all over the world, in fields ranging from geoscience to statistics, are participating in some kind of global conspiracy, regardless of how respectful these commenters are. I block these people immediately after they reveal themselves.

dpifke•17h ago

I use uBlock Origin for this, something like:

  news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^/item\?id=/) tr a.hnuser:has-text(/^dpifke$/):upward(tr)

This mostly works, but only kills the user's comments and not replies, so it sometimes can be confusing.

subsection1h•13h ago

Here's another implementation:

  news.ycombinator.com##.default:has(a[href="user?id=dpifke"]) .comment

Imustaskforhelp•16h ago

> I imagine it could even work like Sponsorblock does, and we could crowdsource people who's comments are inflammatory

Let's discuss how to make this reality.

Do you want a ranking system where more the people downvote some person, the better? if so how do you prevent spam in that, do you take metrics like karma or what exactly?

I don't think that captcha is a solution either but also that I don't know how to feel about removing entire swaths of people, I can think someone writing something bad once and probably get into this "black-list"

Another aspect is once again the black list, I don't know but do we really need a system of essentially a communal ban?

The only thing I can see it reasonable is if there is a slop bot comment poster but I rarely face this issue but if you do, you can probably create a tampermonkey script and tampermonkey scripts work on chrome,firefox and "Userscripts" which should work on safari as well and that script is most likely gonna be compatible on both tampermonkey and userscripts.

stock_toaster•16h ago

One problem with this is it often leads to a missing stair[1] syndrome for new users not knowing whom to block and finding the place overall too toxic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

Bender•12h ago

I've always wished there was a "block comments from this user"

In uBlock Origin -> My Filters:

    news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing.comtr:has(a.hnuser):has-text(/\bUsername\b/)

SomeUserName432•4h ago

A whole extension? Seems like something any custom-css/custom-js plugin can handle. Stylus, or those monkey extensions.

.hnuser attr=href=?user?id=rd

.parent().parent().hide()

Though no idea if such a plugin exists for Safari.

tempodox•23m ago

Comments Owl for Hacker News has a block-this-user feature. Available for the major browsers.

https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news/releas...

pamcake•22h ago

HN already enforces ReCAPTCHA for registrations. More CAPTCHAs will not do much if anything to improve.

1970-01-01•22h ago

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

l33tbro•19h ago

A preliminary discussion is more efficacious than polling uniformed users.

metadope•5h ago

Apologies for my sibling reply here (now flagged and downvoted to oblivion) if it was offensive to you. I thought I knew you irl and was making an overly familiar joke. Typos are nit inherently funny.

lovich•17h ago

I’ve been here for years and somehow never knew about this feature

iammjm•22h ago

> "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

regnodon•21h ago

You're right! It's just the flavor of the month (quarter? year?) complaint.

Enslopification is coming for everyone, everywhere, at all times.

Everything is already slop and will be slop, and will have been being slop.

khannn•22h ago

"Me furiously trying to decide what a EURO thinks a motorcycle is" for 60s

freeplay•22h ago

Captcha is only effective at annoying legitimate users. If there is any incentive to do so, bots have no problem bypassing/solving them.

gilrain•22h ago

Is this your experience as a sysadmin or a user? As a sysadmin, this is an absurd statement in contradiction of my everyday reality.

properbrew•22h ago

I think it depends on how determined the actor is. I see all the range from your simple scripts to full on mimicking real user behavior that I can only really spot from the honeypots they hit.

You'd probably catch most the low hanging fruit for sure, but you would cause friction for real users.

I say this as someone who has enabled captcha on some of our more critical endpoints, there's definitely a place for it.

fragmede•21h ago

https://2captcha.com/

JohnMakin•20h ago

There are dozens, if not far more, of captcha solver API's for extremely cheap. Captcha is very shallow bot "security" theater, they just deter the cheapest attempts.

latest greatest versions of captcha are more resilient to these types of services, but it's a cat and mouse game. I would recommend that you, as a sysadmin, learn at least the most basic things about this stuff.

otterley•17h ago

> I would recommend that you, as a sysadmin, learn at least the most basic things about this stuff.

This sort of language is inappropriate and unnecessarily combative.

In any event, no filter screen is perfect. Getting rid of 80% of bot traffic is a good thing, even if you can't rid yourself of 100% of it. You can't let perfect be the enemy of "pretty good."

People use CAPTCHAs because they work--even if imperfectly. Of course, you have to stay on top of the latest implementations.

electroly•19h ago

My website's contact form has a reCAPTCHA and it still gets spam sent through it (though vastly less). They pass the reCAPTCHA somehow. My contact form literally only emails me and they still do it.

opan•17h ago

Seconding this. Many sites are broken or inaccessible to me in qutebrowser lately due to Cloudflare captchas. I'd rather allow some bots in than lose the ability to use the site my preferred way.

imiric•22h ago

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.

ThrowawayR2•22h ago

> "they helped build"

The overwhelming majority of developers have never worked anywhere close to LLM tech. AI is a very small field requiring specialized expertise.

iamnothere•19h ago

I agree, having never worked on AI or anything privacy invasive for that matter. HN is not a monolith.

dewey•22h ago

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.

pogue•22h ago

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

tptacek•22h ago

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.

ibejoeb•22h ago

Totally. Captcha should be thought of as rate limiting, not anti-spam.

SoftTalker•17h ago

And HN already has rate-limiting, at least for newer accounts.

sqrtminusone•4h ago

This would prevent people from reading HN via a custom RSS, like I do.

b112•22h ago

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"

regnodon•21h ago

But would they still let us read the board though, just not post?

How dystopic. And you're probably right.

paganel•22h ago

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.

jmward01•21h ago

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?

jrh3•21h ago

What's wrong with simple categories for comments... Informative, Funny, Flamebait, etc.

acheron•19h ago

Don’t blame me, I voted for CowboyNeal.

mythrwy•16h ago

That brought back some memories.

regnodon•21h ago

Is complaining about the rise of AI Slop itself a sub-category of AI Slop?

chasebank•21h ago

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.

calgoo•21h ago

The rest of the world thank you for not including us. Also, this leads to the dystopian way where you loose all your access based on someone stealing your details and you have no way of fighting it off.

_DeadFred_•20h ago

Hell yes! Not just a social credit score, but one that permanently locks in/enforces a class system. Tech bros even manage to enshittify social credit scores to be even more shitty. Amazing work.

lovich•17h ago

If you wait around long enough you’ll also start hearing them complain about China’s Totally Different Credit Score System that is only for social control, unlike the American system which is obviously just good business sense and doesn’t exert any control into seemingly unrelated portions of your life

chasebank•2h ago

Pick your poison, I suppose. All I know what we have now is a race to the bottom. Reviews, comments, dating sites, all a giant fabrication.

al_borland•19h ago

What happens if someone had no debt, and thus no score? Lenders see this as a negative (to drive more business), but is likely a positive sign, as it means they live within their means and can get their bills paid without leaning on debt.

behindsight•18h ago

While it's commendable, the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest.

You get a good credit score and still live within your means while also getting additional points + bank covering any fraudulent activity if the card got stolen.

Of course this method probably won't work for people that feel they would rather just cut themselves off from temptation fully or those without access to banking systems, which I sympathise with.

al_borland•17h ago

> the reality is they should have already "figured out" how to play the system and just farmed the reward points from credit cards and immediately pay them off without incurring any interest.

I did this for a while after being bitten a couple times for not having a credit history.

However, I recently stopped. I still keep one card around and active just to maintain my score… just in case. However, spending $10k for $200 in rewards… I don’t really care. That’s mostly a tool to get people to justify more spending.

I’ve quite liked using the debit card and seeing the number go down when I spend, it makes more sense intuitively, and I always know exactly what I have. I had a debit card stolen about 20 years ago; I was able to get the charges reversed, no different from a credit card in my experience. It’s on the Visa network.

I would cancel my last credit card, but I don’t want to deal with cell phone deposits and other nonsense, like I had to in the past.

chasebank•1h ago

I wasn't suggesting that people wouldn't be allowed to participate without a score, (which I think everyone has a score regardless of no debt?). I was suggesting that login / auth takes place by credit score verification. This would solve a couple problems. First, and most important, we know it's a real person commenting / participating. Second, systems could be designed to filter by score. For instance, if I'm researching products on reddit, I'd sure love to know A. it's a real person, and B. to filter by some score threshold. I'd wager people with higher scores have less incentive to get paid to shill some product online.

Anyways, from the little research I've done, it's certainly illegal and not a proper mechanism for authentication. One can dream though :)

estimator7292•19h ago

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)

kevinh456•19h ago

Captchas are not effective. You can pay 2captcha less than a penny per captcha and humans solve them for you.

nobody9999•13h ago

>Captchas are not effective. You can pay 2captcha less than a penny per captcha and humans solve them for you.

I'd expect that if we took Randall Munroe's advice[0], that price would go up significantly, perhaps prohibitively so.

[0] https://xkcd.com/810/

disambiguation•18h ago

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.

FloorEgg•18h ago

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.

binary132•18h ago

Having to invite people in person and maintaining a network of trust could work. There would always be people ignoring friends selling accounts to bots, but ultimately I guess it would be mostly too costly.

baxuz•17h ago

It is a solved problem with ZKPs

FloorEgg•17h ago

I studied ZKPs. You and I must have very different understandings of the actual scope of the problem. Like I said, everything that exists or is being worked on that makes a dent (including ZKPs) is incomplete or has ugly trade offs.

Maybe you are thinking purely from a math / theoretical perspective, but I'm thinking of a compete solution that's practical to use to solve the problem for sites like HN and many others.

baxuz•17h ago

https://eu-digital-identity-wallet.github.io/eudi-doc-archit...

fennecbutt•17h ago

Yes, I'd thought about roughly the same premise before and came to the conclusion that it really is a hard thing to do.

Even if you use state ids for it, who's to say that a particular state won't be...loose with issuing ids that can then go on to be used for bots.

It's even a problem with humans as well - one human can be having a pleasant conversation with the other, not aware that that person isn't being genuine, or is lying, has ulterior motives or has been instructed on what to say by someone else.

binary132•18h ago

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.

nickphx•17h ago

no.

crazygringo•17h ago

> 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.

vivzkestrel•14h ago

- 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

janez2•9h ago

four point nine times ten to the uh... 74th?

vivzkestrel•7h ago

well i think you are right, let me think aloud here, 10^63 is one vigintillion so unvigintillion would be 10^66, duo 10^69, tre 10^72 , that makes 400 something as 10^74

notepad0x90•14h ago

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!

erelong•13h ago

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...

Bluescreenbuddy•13h ago

Why would we want more users. The more people you add the worse it gets

chistev•12h ago

You joined in 2023.

Pooge•10h ago

He could've been lurking before that. Just as I did. Could be a second account, too.

loveparade•10h ago

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.

sgammon•10h ago

Suggesting this in 2025 is wild

zz5759•9h ago

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.

MopAmine•4h ago

i dont know

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Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?

Tell HN: Get a dying iPhone 12 mini in 2026

I've maintained an open source task manager for 8 years

Ask HN: Any Microsoft employees/devs here? What's happening to Microsoft?

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

Ask HN: How do you use 5–10 minute gaps productively?

Ask HN: Is there a Zod validation library for Golang?

Ask HN: How would you decouple from the US?

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)

I built an AI agent that deploys a PR to production

Ask HN: Where is legacy codebase maintenance headed?

Funding Opportunities with Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC)

Implementing NaN Boxing in a Stack-Based VM

RevisionDojo, a YC startup, is running astroturfing campaigns targeting kids?

Developing a high level language over Zig

Ask HN: We built an air-gapped document vault with encrypted print and export

Ask HN: What's a standard way for apps to request text completion as a service?

Ask HN: Reading list for being a better engineer?

Git analytics that works across GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket

I made a lofi page for late night work

Ask HN: What will you pick as your database of 2026 Yugabyte, TiDB or SurrealDB?

Amazon Prime AI overviews can't even get the basics right

Ask HN: Has anyone else been struggling with search lately?

Anyone building software for wearable tech?

Ask HN: Is anyone aware of a LinkedIn mirror like xcancel.com for X?

Ask HN: How do small teams make sure recurring tasks don't slip?

Who are the companies that still use Perl in their back end?

Ask HN: Anyone else seeing porn images in YouTube ad preview images?

Tell HN: I'm having the worst career winter of my life

Ask HN: How do you do store-and-forward telemetry at the edge?

Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?

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