Can HN ban new accounts? or charge money?

it should be better bot detection system - especially because of ai generated comments - and that's all

So punish real users who just discovered HN, or old lurkers who finally decide to join?

Great idea.

Personally, I think new accounts should cost $300. It’s not a perfect solution, clearly. But it should hopefully reduce the floodgates.

Instead of banning and charging,HN could double down on trust signal,like device reputation,posting velocity limits,and stronger weighting of upvotes from long standing accounts.

You could always join Kuro5hin it's only a one time payment.

Part of the magic of HN is that it's open to everyone, and everyone is treated equally. I'm not aware of anywhere else on the internet where a farmer from a poor country, a college student, and a CEO of a billion-dollar company can have a meaningful conversation, and I think that it would be a real shame to lose that.

I agree that the bot accounts are annoying and getting worse, but I don't think that making it more difficult to create an account is a good solution here.

90% of the stories on HN are AI related. It’s normal to have so many bots nowadays. If HN dies, wouldn’t be the worst thing tbh

Metafilter charged $5. Of course, putting a barrier to entry is also more likely to make a site die.

Perhaps this is unavoidable. In the end maybe somewhere has to be slightly "underground" to be good, lest the bots trampling the surface like the opening scenes of Terminator find you.

I would not call LLM users outright "bots"... That being said, perhaps some captcha requiring human empathy could weed them out?