Banning and New Accounts

The cluster centers on debates about the effectiveness of user bans on online platforms, as spammers and trolls can easily create new throwaway or multiple accounts to evade restrictions, with discussions on detection, spam prevention, and incentives not to abuse.

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20
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5
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#6521
Topic ID

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Keywords

TOS AI YC OP POV SEC siftscience.com S11 ycombinator.com TOR accounts account banned create new account throwaway fake pet create new pet peeve

Sample Comments

dang Jun 10, 2020 View on HN

Please don't. Plenty of new accounts are old users.

iqkznnft Jun 11, 2022 View on HN

This is parroting the "don't ban people because this way at least we can see what they're doing" meme. What, they can't create more accounts?

ethanbond Feb 17, 2024 View on HN

Don't need a vast array of accounts if you're not getting banned.

tonmoy May 20, 2017 View on HN

That is fair, but maybe the providers just want to stop account spamming on their sites, can you blame them for that?

gloosx Sep 19, 2024 View on HN

Why is banning even a threat? I can make a new account for 20 cents lol.

muzani Sep 15, 2023 View on HN

It's possibly because of abuse from bots and such. It still does a great job of letting you manage anonymous accounts and swapping between them.

chucksta Oct 4, 2025 View on HN

You missed the obvious one, it creates a black market for old accounts

Jyaif Aug 21, 2022 View on HN

Because services don't want to be spammed with fake accounts.

nickthemagicman Apr 15, 2019 View on HN

How do you stop this? It will just encourage then to create fake accounts .

Qwertious Feb 20, 2021 View on HN

Why assume that? Maybe there's a bug in their internal software, and it's cheaper to create a program that checks if you're banned and automatically creates a new account, than it is to fix their internal problem.