[dang]

That's right—some users vouched for those 3 after we'd killed them.

That makes sense, because if you look at individual posts in isolation you might think they were unfairly killed. One needs to look at the posting history of the account as a whole to understand what the issue was.

(Btw, thanks for explaining the context in those other threads.)

[dredmorbius]

I've had repeated comment and email exchanges with you over the years over whether or not an explicit "killed" or "dead" indicator on accounts and their posts/comments should exist. I understand the reasons against this, and arguably they'd be more relevant in the case of detected bot accounts (the indicator would be yet more training data, assuming feedback training).

I've also been experimenting with my own indicators for specific accounts based on my own criteria and interactions which I've found useful (applied through my own HN tweaks). E.g., if I see an explicit mod note that an account has been banned, I can mark it as such myself, sparing confusion.

How HN can implement a Voight-Kampff test becomes an increasingly relevant question.... One of several HN needs to consider with increasing urgency.

(Three 'graph pattern ... is again noted...)

[em-bee]

more important than an indicator it would probably be useful to somehow disable vouching for a killed account. i don't know if it is possible to set the flag counter to some high number so that vouching simply has no effect or to an invalid number like -1

[dredmorbius]

That's antithetical to how HN has operated in the past. Vouching for deads is fair when the account is an actual human, and happens to post valid content. I do this occasionally myself (I read with "showdead" on), though not especially often.

See, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525284> also the FAQ: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch>.

Accounts killed for spamming AI content seem to me to violate that premise, and an unvouchable kill does seem appropriate, especially where it's not immediately evident to the casual reader that an account was killed for posting AI content.

I'm thinking of how I'd like to indicate such accounts myself, and am leaning toward adding a robot emogi via an ":after" CSS rule.

[em-bee]

i think we are actually agreeing. i am not talking about making kills unvouchable in general but i am suggesting how an unvouchable kill could be implemented without to much effort. the unvouchable kill should of course be only applied to appropriate cases, it's not meant to replace the regular kill.

[dredmorbius]

Yes, we are in agreement here. I was simply noting what HN's past policy and rationale have been.

LLMs change the calculus somewhat in making automated bot-posting far more viable. It's clearly already a problem. I suspect that moderation policies will have to adapt to this. There's also the fact that such a change would make AI-banned discernable from normal bans, in that AI-banned accounts would not have vouchable comments. If explicitly noting AI banning isn't adopted on the basis that this would provide information to either the AI or its operator of the fact / nature of the banning, the absence of a vouch option would reveal the fact regardless.

(A relatively small example of changes we'll see induced by LLMs in the larger world as well. Interesting times....)

[em-bee]

my suggestion would not remove the vouch option, it would just make it ineffective. people using it would not notice. the system would still indicate that you vouched for a message.