The argument against it is that it's futile. Banning new accounts will lead to stagnation and stop bot accounts but people will simply filter their own comments through an LLM, either to avoid steganography or to maximize their compliance with the guidelines and potential karma. Eventually they'll just have an agent comment for them because that's the best way to maximize their utility of the forum. All of the posted articles will either be written by AI or will be about AI. All Show HNs will be vibe coded. This will happen because it's what an increasing number of people on HN want to normalize.

The fact is the ethos of this forum has become antithetical to what hacker culture and tech have become, which is incurious, misanthropic and aggressively pro AI. That isn't a problem that can be solved with engineering, it's existential. Either the culture changes or HN does, and as HN's whole thing is "avoiding the Eternal September at all costs," which reduces to "avoiding cultural change at all cost," HN can't change and survive. Immovable object versus irresistable force.

I guess the only advice I have is to stop using HN whenever it becomes useless to you and find greener pastures. The Fediverse is still good.