[sdenton4]

Any amount of friction reduces the amount of slop. What proportion of clankers are going to realize that they need to warm up the accounts two weeks in advance? Answer: a proportion that your never going to see with that barrier in place.

With a couple few layers of defense, you'll weed out almost all of the bad actors. Without strong monetary incentives for spamming, you also avoid most persistent actors.

[localuser13]

With enough layers you will also weed out almost all of the good actors. Normal people are busy and don't have time nor patience to jump over too many hoops to promote their cool new research, or to respond in a thread where someone linked it.

[heavyset_go]

Reddit has more friction to sign up or post while new or low karma.

The main subreddits will basically shadowban you until your account is aged and has more than X karma.

[ryandrake]

This is why I don’t create a Reddit account or post there: there are so many rules that dissuade new accounts. I don’t even bother to try.

[qingcharles]

Reddit is fantastic, to me. It's worth the struggle to get past the initial bullshit.

There are a lot of flaws, though. Their appeal system is very broken, for instance.

[qingcharles]

Which in itself is annoying, IMO. It creates a whole separate set of problems. You need karma, so people post in karma-farming subs to get a few crumbs. Then you get auto-banned from a dozen of the top subreddits preemptively for farming.

Reddit hasn't been as overrun by bots yet, for the most part, although how long they can hold out I don't know.

[pixelmelt]

maybe not overrun by spam, but the amount of bots I see on popular subs is definitely not 0

[intended]

You don’t have a choice.

We live with GenAI, and the human to bot ratio is now leaning in a different direction. The old norms are dead, because the old structures that held them up are gone.

This idea that theres “more hoops - losing participation” on this thread keeps assuming that the community is unaffected by the macro trends.

It’s weirdly positing that HN posts and users, are somehow immune/unaffected by those trends.