Does YC really get much spam? As of 3/1/08 10am PDT, scrolling through the 180 visible "new" articles with showdead set to yes revealed 3 [dead] stories: the sex one mentioned in this thread, something about sharks and an acne medication one.

Come to think of it, a profile option to increase (or decrease) the effective gravity for articles posted by users who post articles marked [dead] in the last few days could be useful to monitor this.

Or even something as simple as a /dead view.