So if the "wrong" person finds a critical vulnerability in GitHub, the payout is capped at $10,000. Might reduce the likelihood of it being submitted to the bug bounty program.

▲

7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It might, but as someone who has to review public vulnerability reports for a much less popular website, I completely understand why they’re building a vouch program to dissuade slop reports. One would presume their internal team is using frontier models for red team agent scanning against potential attack surface, and so this is a potential risk they’re willing to take.

Tragedy of the commons that someone who hasn’t passed the filter yet might have their payout limited.

Vouch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961 - February 2026 (486 comments)

▲

super256 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

tbh hackerone should just implement a +/- reputation points feature on researcher profiles. Like, the researcher submits a slop report to GitHub via H1, GitHub looks at it and identifies it as slop, GitHub presses the -rep button on reaearcher profile which bans them from submitting to GitHub on H1 again and makes their rep points minus 1. Companies should be able to configure you need at least 10 rep points to receive payouts. Only specific (by H1 chosen) companies can +/- rep.

So, researchers first need to collect some positive rep. But the rep points are global, so once you have fixed a few bugs for Google, you've gotten enough +rep that you can also receive stuff at GitHub.

Oh, and ID check when signing up at H1.

Long term all beg bounty submitters would be banned for pretty much all of tech.

	▲	Synthetic7346 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think they do that already, there are signal ratios

▲

applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does decreasing pay for humans discourage slop reports, exactly?

▲

dfedbeef 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It discourages all reports, so you get the reduced slop reports for free.

	▲	sevenseacat an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To my mind, it encourages more reports because that way you're more likely to have some of them slip through and get approved, meaning your future reports are worth more.
	▲	applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Does it, though? It discourages humans from putting in effort because their time will not be rewarded. But the slop reports were not the result of time nor effort. I'd rather expect changing a payout from $1k to $250 doesn't meaningfully move the needle on someone spending two minutes prompting their OpenClaw to spam bug bounties. Especially since the reports you actually want to filter out are the sub-50-IQ reports that were always going to get $0 either way.