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...

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dang 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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user- an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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dredmorbius an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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fragmede an hour ago | parent [-]

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 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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nekusar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a strong positive sign that poison fountain works.

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

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logancbrown 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah. A fun thing to do is to try and actually read common crawl! Really makes you think, what we're feeding them...
	▲	zuzululu 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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