If each article takes five minutes to read, it would take the submitter 6 hours 40 minutes(!) to read all the articles he submitted. This implies the submitter is not reading the articles before submission.

This worries me because it is indicating submission by quantity, not by quality, and the thing I love about HN is the quality of the submissions.

If some of the submissions would have been done by other people, that's fine. IMHO...

a) Don't hog the karma.

b) As pointed out by benologist, the weaker submissions would not have been submitted by others. The weaker submissions are therefore competing against other submissions that are more deserving of our attention, contributing to the dreaded "deterioration of HN quality."

Also, you could try using median rather than mean and that might produce better results.

For me, I don't even care so much about the Karma but if one person is submitting 80 stories then it either creates a one dimensional feed (if the user is actually reviewing those articles) or it is automated and there is no guarantee of quality. Either way, I believe that it can only serve to decrease the quality of the site. I would be in favor of submission caps. I mean I read maybe 5 articles a day, that are worth re-posting to a larger audience. So capping it at 5-10 I think would not hurt the site, but stands a chance of improving the new feed (which is where I hang out)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496269

Two hours after this was posted someone posted the link within that comment as its own story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496475

Normally it's not a bad thing to have a new discussion if the subject is too tangential to the main item being discussed. But this is close enough that the discussion probably ought to have happened directly within the thread.

Additionally, the person who submitted it as its own story received (as it now stands) 145 points for the effortless submission, far more than would be likely for even an incredibly well-written and researched reply within the original thread.

HN has gamified participation by rewarding people with karma. Even though it's only a bullshit number, it triggers a desire to maximize this number. As it stands, submissions are too highly rewarded relative to the value and behavior like 80+ submissions per day results.

(For the record, I collected 13 points for my comment so far.)

Similar to this is when the same event is reported by different sites, each of which gets submitted. We end up with essentially the same discussion happening in multiple places.

Ideally there would be some magical way to have all these posts direct to a canonical discussion, but in practice it seems this requires human intervention.

In the meantime perhaps the best action is to flag the late-comer posts and post a discussion link to an existing thread.

Some, but just to flag the duplication; how to process the dup is a matter of policy and could be largely automated once the humans had annotated it. Some ideas in that vein: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950

For instance, users won't get karma points for stories they submit until they reach some threshold for karma from their comments. This would be beneficial in a number of ways:

  * encourage better comments from new users
  * prevent downvote capability for new users that only submit a lot of stories
  * fewer low-quality stories will be submitted

When I first arrived on HN, I was unsure about what was appropriate to post. I learned by reading the comments and contributing where I had something useful to share.

Now, after a year or two, I often hear or read a story and think HN has to see this. Then I step back and really weigh whether it fits HN or if I just think it's cool. Often, I end up not submitting. By starting out slow I realized HN isn't popularity contest, but an important community.

That was my experience anyway, YMMV.

1. It's overpowered. Based on some experiments I conducted a year or so ago, it seems like 1-2 flags equal about 10-20 places dropped in the rankings. It's brutal. A single person in a bad mood can drop a story like a stone. I don't know the exact maths, but a single flag seems to have the effect of many downvotes.

2. It's not what it was designed for! According to the guidelines, flagging is meant to be for "spam or offtopic", not for stuff you don't like or disagree with and want to downvote. If you disagree with it, write a comment to explain why, or find a comment that agrees with your disagreement and upvote that. Flagging is not a way to express disagreement!

3. It's mean. I regularly get articles on the front page, and I don't care that much what happens to them (though of course I like to see the discussion they generate!), but once upon a time I did, and I'm sure that's still the case for many. When you put your heart and soul into an article, and it miraculously got picked up by HN, and it's on the front page, and people are finally checking out your blog, and it's getting more visitors in one hour than it had in the last 6 months... and you see the story suddenly vanish to the second page because someone flagged it... wow, that feels like a punch to the stomach. So please don't flag "real" articles, only flag spam/trash.

If you think an article sucks, post a comment to explain why you think so. Maybe you misunderstood. In any case, the feedback will be clearer. Please don't use the flagging sledgehammer to express disagreement.

(note: I don't know if pg would agree with the above, but these are my feelings)

Disagreeing with something is not a reason to downvote either.

https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

to see what is already done about this. The account submitting so many stories may decide to be more selective after considering the implications of site algorithms.

a) this appears to be turned off by default (line 1535)

b) if turned on it only applies to new users (lines 1539, 1540)

(Disclaimer: this is the first time I'm looking at the source, please correct me if I'm missing something.)

One idea would be to create separate sections for discussions, news, blog links, at all.

The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy, which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

edit: Though the value would need to be much lower than 20 per karma with that modifier. My average of 2.73 with 2011 karma would let me post as much as I want.

karma * 3.7 * average would come to around 20,000 for me. That would let me submit an article every 18 hours.

As someone who almost never submits stuff, I find it really frustrating that the few times I do find something that I think would be great, I see it get knocked down on the "new" page within an hour because there are so many submissions coming in. The rate of new submissions seems like it makes it almost random what just happens to get picked up in the brief window of time and what doesn't.

There is always a lot of complaints about content but there is an inherent system allowing posters to know what the mass wants rather than one commenter and making sure the best content rises.

Don't vote up anything you believe doesn't deserve to be on the front page or flag anything that deserves to be flagged. If there are very strict content guidelines some of the most interesting and obscure content won't be recommended for posting.

Not to mention, most of the stuff I comment on, I want to engage in a decent discussion. If a post doesn't have a lot of comments, chances are the people here don't think it's all that important.

Even not doing it blindly (say, you save up links that are good and post them all at peak times for better results) is not in good form either if it is more than say 5 at a time.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386443