Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not be full of bots?

Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by viraptor on Thursday August 22, 2019 @07:34PM (#20773355)

> what makes you think HN is not full of bots?

Exactly. Turn on show dead and look at the new page sometimes. There's a bit of spam there. Although much less recently! I suspect some new automation was added to remove the blatant entries.

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Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by dang on Thursday August 22, 2019 @07:36PM (#20773364)

What do you mean by recently? We did do a bunch of new work on this and I'm curious if you noticed its effects.

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Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by viraptor on Thursday August 22, 2019 @08:21PM (#20773619)

I only registered this when I checked the "new" page now, but I remember a few months (?) ago seeing at least 4 or so low effort spam links per page almost all the time (marked dead). Especially titles in non-English script and call-out agencies with phone numbers were much more common. Now I can't find those at all.

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Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by dang on Thursday August 22, 2019 @08:34PM (#20773670)

Could be related! But good to hear in any case.

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Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by masonic on Friday August 23, 2019 @03:10AM (#20775160)

There's still a lot of illicit activity visible with "showdead", e.g. sites offering sales of reviews, including negative reviews. I don't see why sites with fraud, porn, etc aren't just blanked out altogether.

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Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by dang on Friday August 23, 2019 @03:50PM (#20781868)

It's valuable for us to be able to tell the community "you can see everything that gets killed if you want to". Many HN users want to decide for themselves how good a job we (moderators, software, user flags, etc.) do of deciding what should get killed vs. not. If some posts got blanked out altogether, that would no longer be possible, and then we'd get complaints about "unaccountable moderators censoring things they don't like", etc. We get those anyway, but the showdead setting helps to mitigate them and keep the bulk of the community satisfied. We'd lose a lot of good faith if we changed that.

Of course if we added a second level of deadness, we could add a "show-dead-dead" setting to make it visible, but that would be too complicated.

Edit: I should add that there HN also has deletion, meaning a post is no longer visible even to users with showdead on, but we only do that when the author of a post has requested it, or (in extremely rare cases) because our lawyers told us we had to.

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Re:Ask HN: How can HN allow login without an email and not b... by masonic on Saturday August 24, 2019 @04:28AM (#20785998)

  if we added a second level of deadness, we could add a "show-dead-dead" setting

You could have a "Trash bin" subcategory into which the titles/metadata of submits that deserve being rendered unnavigable (porn, fraud, malware links) go. Transparency is retained while users are protected.

For example, when Craigslist deletes an ad, the link remains clickable and shows only "this listing has been flagged for removal" if you click it.

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