[peishang]

How much would it help cut down if Show HN was prohibited for accounts that were green and/or only had 1 karma?

Meaning you would have to demonstrate that you had or were willing to contribute to the HN community before just promoting your own stuff.

[dang]

As it happens, a great counterexample has been on the frontpage for hours:

Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051852 - Feb 2026 (34 comments)

What a bummer it would be to lose excellent posts by new users. They do happen!

[moWerk]

This was a super encouraging and uplifting experience for everyone involved in the project. Thanks so much for providing this excellent platform.

[redbell]

My favorite example for a new user is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33566924

[parpfish]

on problem here is that I don't want to share my ShowHN projects with my HN account because it'll connect my real identity to my pseudonymous HN identity.

so, in the past, i've created throwaway HN accounts for sharing things that connect to my real ID.

[abcd_f]

The solution to this is to allow aliases ... or account groups if you will and then allow/disallow things based on combined karma.

[jedberg]

I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. If you aren't proud enough of it to attach your real name, or your pseudonymous account, maybe it shouldn't be posted.

[anonymous908213]

It has nothing to do with "pride". Anonymity is about being able to speak freely without having to feel the need to self-censor one's views. I don't want to feel hesitant to make a comment on a controversial subject out of fear that it will be permanently associated with my projects in a detrimental manner.

This is doubly true with anything that involves your real name. I don't think enough people understand that there is a genuine, non-zero risk that commenting on political matters with your real name risks getting you imprisoned or killed 5, 10, 20 years later. The internet is a permanent record for your views, and history has given us many examples of dictators who have purged millions of people deemed intellectuals, enemies of the regime, etc. This is true regardless of how much you trust your current government, because governments change and authoritarianism can happen anywhere. Even the self-proclaimed bastion of free speech is currently attempting to persecute people criticising the government online[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

(...that said, the LLM spam situation is so dire that even with these views on anonymity, I would be willing to create a new account where I carefully self-censor everything I say until I meet whatever proposed threshold would be necessary to submit a ShowHN, so I'm not opposed to such a limit out of necessity.)

[ModernMech]

Honestly I would support only allowing Show HN for accounts that can downvote. It's really not such a high threshold.

[anonymous908213]

It would filter out some people who lurk but still have interesting things to contribute, but despite the drawbacks that threshold is probably the most immediately impactful solution. Of course, it strongly incentivizes the purchase/selling of accounts, and karma farming, but that problem is perhaps less of a problem than all high-effort human content getting completely drowned out. There are already a plethora of spambots making comments getting upvoted, so it's not like that problem doesn't already exist either.

[saghm]

I'm not sure that incentive is so strong. Is it really that desirable to pay money to be able to showcase a free project?

[bigthymer]

We would have to prepare for a deluge of accounts posting\commenting just for the sake of accumulating karma to be able to downvote.

[dylan604]

That's the key thing to remember here, that any ideas that are implemented will be suspect to gaming just to get around what ever is chosen.