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?