[atomic128]

There is a large community of people that poison scrapers.

The poison gets better every day, and the community is continuously growing. Poison Fountain, alone, transmits hundreds of gigabytes of poison per day, which goes into scrapers, git repositories on every hosting platform, social media, etc.

Part of the poisoning community on Reddit, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/comments/1uocaii/a_n...

[dang]

I've banned this account because we don't allow single-purpose accounts on HN, and your account has been doing that for quite some time now.

We ban such accounts regardless of what the single purpose happens to be. Pre-existing agendas are not what HN is for and destroy the curious conversation that it is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [e-mail] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[user-]

Just curious dang, did you warn them before banning?

Im not against the ban perse (single purpose accounts are bad), just curious if they had a chance to change their contribution style.

[dang]

No, but if they have a change of heart and genuinely want to use HN as intended, they're welcome to let us know. I've added that in an edit now.

[dredmorbius]

Seriously, dang?

10 comments (excluding subsequent in-thread replies) over four months, always in contexts in which either the topic of LLM scraping or Poison Fountain itself has already been mentioned.

This strikes me as contextually informational, and is no different from other project representatives appearing in threads discussing their own subjects or posts. Such as, say, Jon Corbet (@corbet), of LWN, whose activity on HN shows a similar pattern and roughly equivalent frequency.

I hope it goes without saying I'm not suggesting corbet's handle be banned, anything but.

atomic128's comments are predictable, but apposite, informative, non-disruptive, and address an increasingly urgent issue. Whether or not it's an effective mitigation is of course another discussion, but it seems plausible at first blush.

As dang should well know but others may not, I often contact mods directly for HN issues, including numerous "one-note flute" alerts. atomic128's account should be un-banned, though perhaps they might communicate with HN's mods over what would be a more acceptable mode of interaction.

[dang]

The most recent 60 (!) comments plus every submission of the last 6 months were all about the same thing. That's extreme. The posts didn't all mention that specific project, but there was only one topic and they were extremely repetitive. This is not a close call.

I made it all the way back to https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=atomic128&next=4628060... (6 months ago) before seeing posts about anything else, only to find that there was a different agenda before that. Not cool.

Edit: and before all that, there was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=atomic128&next=4164795.... This is obviously not using HN as intended.

[dredmorbius]

Exceptions?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116093> (LLM but not PF).

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095664> (a16h)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695693> (vuln exploits) 2026-1-20

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280602> (???, but not PF)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195234> (Monero / Dark Web) 2025-12-8

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894305> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826273> (Tor hidden service) Nov 2025

That's from the past 20 comments.

Submissions: 8 most recent on PF, 9+ cover nuclear power, Tor dark web, robotaxis, and other topics.

Again: Not a one-note flute, though fairly focused of late on AI and poisoning.

Again: I think the ban is unwarranted. I'm not sure what's driving your thinking here, but a no-warnings ban seems excessive. And given YC's current preponderance of AI/agentic launches (<https://news.ycombinator.com/launches>), self-serving and contrary to the "we moderate YC stories less" guideline.

(Yes, I'm aware "less" isn't "none", and this is an account/user rather than story, I hope my point stands and is clear.)

The Yann LeCun posts you link are ... a bit OTT. That's also a couple of years ago.

I've said my bit. I'm hoping you and atomic128 can come to an understanding in email.

[dataflow]

> Such as, say, Jon Corbet (@corbet), of LWN, whose activity on HN shows a similar pattern and roughly equivalent frequency.

I took a look at the most recent comments from both accounts and they don't look similar to me in this respect.

I think there are two questions here though:

1. Was the violation egregious?

2. Did it deserve an immediate ban, or did they deserve a warning etc.?

Seems to me the answer to (1) is yes, but the answer to (2) I'm less sure about.

[dredmorbius]

Jon's been around a while and some of the piss and vinegar of youth may have subsided. He does tend to show up with LWN comes up, whether as a topic of discussion (or more often) from submitted articles. That's his baliwick, and again, I don't fault him at all for it.

Our other friend here is a more recent participant to HN, at least under this handle. (I don't know that there are others, only what I can see from this one.)

[fragmede]

I think the reasoning is about having alt accounts for different purposes. He intention is to map one human to one account and have all of their thoughts from that one account, instead of one human having one account to discuss scraping on, and a different account to discuss crypto on.

[dredmorbius]

I'm pretty confident it's not that.

HN's prime directive is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity": <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> and many, many, many dang comments.

I'm pretty sure that the specific gripe is posting excessively (not even necessarily exclusively) on a single topic or theme. See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19392902> for a more detailed comment from dang.

Occasional alts are explicitly permitted, though not to engage in abuse (e.g., mutual admiration societies, sock-puppetry). See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9963551> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9823379> (both against sock puppetry) and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9122086> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7504621> (on where throwaways are/aren't permitted).

Where HN does favour persistent accounts the stated claim is to foster community, rather than for nefarious tracking purposes: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18082346> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>. From that last:

Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.

[teravor]

I'm confused why everyone is pretending that a ban holds any meaning here. he probably already has a new account, it might have made sense to just silently ban him in the hope of imposing a minor cost on what you believe he is doing, but wasting your time addressing it imposed a far greater cost on you than him.

[dang]

I understand how it can be confusing. The key factors in doing it this way are (1) the community regards older accounts, especially ones that have significant posting history, as more credible; and (2) doing it publicly rather than silently has transparency value.

[nekusar]

This is a strong positive sign that poison fountain works.

I wasn't aware of this project. Thanks for the heads up.

[dang]

It's not a sign about that project in any way. I had never heard of it and have no opinion about it one way or the other.

It's just a sign that single-agenda accounts aren't allowed here—no more, no less. That's why I said "We ban such accounts regardless of what the single purpose happens to be".

[logancbrown]

People think this is causing issues for data collection for LLMs, but in reality it's not and there are several very trivial mechanisms to employ in data collection to bypass the "poison data" issue. The internet landscape was already poisoned with fake data, fringe conspiracies, and text before this Poison Fountain initiative.

[andai]

Yeah. A fun thing to do is to try and actually read common crawl!

Really makes you think, what we're feeding them...

[zuzululu]

exactly i took a look at that subreddit and doesnt look like theres any professionals just bunch of anti-AI users who thinks they are smarter

its very easy to detect and bypass poison type of tools largely because of the fact that there are far more outlets for truthful info so unless you can get everyone to buy in (with real legal liabilities) its not effective

also its possible to poison the poisoners with a certain pill that would have very real consequences for those maintaining whatever github repo/communities