This is not an anti-AI rant. If a future AI agent truly has high quality posts and wants to use the site normally, that's fine. I'm talking about spam campaigns with hundreds of new accounts. We need new solutions to this problem.
I'll start by proposing a solution that could work for HN and similar forums. Feel free to iterate on it or propose your different ideas in the comments. Here goes:
For logged-in users, instead of ranking posts and comments on the server-side, the server only delivers a chronological feed + the current logged-in user's voting history.
Using the chronological feed as the base, each of your past votes changes the ranking of your feed by a tiny bit, and that's calculated client-side. You're more likely to see posts and comments from users you've upvoted in the past at the top.
In short, this means a new account will see a completely chronological feed, while an established account will see a feed modified by only their own past votes.
The public feed for non-logged-in users would still be ranked by the server. No changes there.
So each user gets a fully personalized bubble when logged in, except it's not a bubble because n=1. And it's really easy to break out of the bubble by logging out.
Spam bots can post and vote all they want, but they won't change the core userbase's experience that much, because the bots will only have access to a chronological feed. It has no taste, which is accumulated over time, and therefore can't spam votes and replies on real conversations nearly as much.
