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?
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.
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.
I'd expect that if we took Randall Munroe's advice[0], that price would go up significantly, perhaps prohibitively so.
https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news/releas...