It seems like eliminating the ability for noobs with less than, say, 20 karma from submitting stories would fix this and get rid of a lot of the spam that gets posted.
I know it seems unwelcoming to noobs, but we already have a tiered system where you need N karma for your votes to count, to downvote, to submit polls, etc.
I didn't submit anything for months after joining, which I think is the best way to go. Through actively participating in the comments, I got a good idea of what the HN community was really like.
And even now I don't submit that much (though since I discovered the bookmarklet my rate of submissions has increased). HN isn't about submitting to me, it's about comments (though obviously I realize we need good stories to comment on).
The biggest drawback I see is that it might impact the quality of comments. If users desperately want to hit that submission threshold, they might comment a lot or comment group-think-ily trying to pick up a few points here and a few points there until they hit that threshold.
I've thought about this too and it looked like a tough problem to solve, but it isn't.
Why do people do that?
They usually do it for Ask HN posts and well you can easily discriminate for them. Further if anyone tries to spoof the system by adding a URL there then we can parse it to see if there is any text there according to the stupidity filter. So, essentially it will still work.
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It seems like eliminating the ability for noobs with less than, say, 20 karma from submitting stories would fix this and get rid of a lot of the spam that gets posted.
I know it seems unwelcoming to noobs, but we already have a tiered system where you need N karma for your votes to count, to downvote, to submit polls, etc.
I didn't submit anything for months after joining, which I think is the best way to go. Through actively participating in the comments, I got a good idea of what the HN community was really like.
And even now I don't submit that much (though since I discovered the bookmarklet my rate of submissions has increased). HN isn't about submitting to me, it's about comments (though obviously I realize we need good stories to comment on).
The biggest drawback I see is that it might impact the quality of comments. If users desperately want to hit that submission threshold, they might comment a lot or comment group-think-ily trying to pick up a few points here and a few points there until they hit that threshold.
I honestly think this is the way to go, especially if you figure out a good damper on frivolous commentary.
There's always the stupidity corpus that mr. Graham used to talk about...
http://stupidfilter.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Status
That would prevent people from using throwaway accounts, which a lot of people seem to do. And they are not spammers.
I've thought about this too and it looked like a tough problem to solve, but it isn't.
Why do people do that?
They usually do it for Ask HN posts and well you can easily discriminate for them. Further if anyone tries to spoof the system by adding a URL there then we can parse it to see if there is any text there according to the stupidity filter. So, essentially it will still work.