Ask PG: Please rate-limit submissions per user | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Please rate-limit submissions per user

21 pointscperciva12 comments

We've had 18 submissions from the same user in the past 2 hours. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of them, but I think HN works best when there is a wide diversity of stories, and having so many similar submissions is getting in the way.

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Perhaps you are you referring to me. I posted 19 links within the span of a couple hours (around the time you posted this).

My submissions -- which spanned aerospace, commercial spaceflight, natural language processing, embedded computing, error-correction codes, etc. (three of which frontpaged) -- are far more on-topic for this community than the usual frontpage garbage. 15+ iPhone articles a day, "Stephen Colbert makes Bing donate money", or Steve Jobs this and that do not belong on the frontpage day in and day out. At least not on a site called Hacker News.

If you look in the New queue right now you'll see several Apple articles, mostly about whatever is already on the frontpage (getting upvotes no less). This isn't a personal crusade against clashing ideologies (I use Apple as an example several times because this site overflows with Apple news), just an attempt to bring a little more hacker back to this site and a little less Engadget.

I apologize to anyone whose non-Reddit quality submissions were bumped to page 2 over the course of those two hours. To be clear, I believe your claim of so many similar submissions 'getting in the way' is well, ridiculous.

I have to agree with everything you said. "Apple stories" are getting tedious.

Here here, I can do with out both the pro-Apple and a the con-Apple stories all together. Unless it's a leak. Unfortunately right now it's just a slow release of what was announced in WWDC or a slow release of counter-marketing by a lot of people who have competitive products.

Maybe as an option we could just ask the submitter to slow down a little. If it's not spam he will probably be respectful of the request. My thoughts are that maybe sometime in the future some hot topic might call for a lot of quick submits—you never know.

Plus to me, I hate to see a forum with freedom of speech tightened down for everyone by iron fisted inflexible code just because of one user, one time. I like this forum a lot no matter how many posts someone makes, but 18 quick posts does seem like a lot to me too. Must be a slow day for him.

Maybe we could send him this: ICMP message Type 4 - Source Quench - the source is sending data too fast for the receiver (Code 0), the buffer has filled up, slow down!

Maybe as an option we could just ask the submitter to slow down a little

If it was just this one time I would have done that -- but it has happened in the past with other people.

maybe sometime in the future some hot topic might call for a lot of quick submits

Lots of quick submits, sure. But from the same person? I doubt it... if there's big news, lots of people will be submitting links.

Oh, I understand what you mean now. He must have brewed up some extra strong coffee or downed a case of Jolt or two. 18 is a lot of posts for one person.

> There's nothing particularly wrong with any of them

Then why does it matter that they were submitted by the same person. I'd rather have 18 interesting links posted from the same person than 18 dumb links posted by different people.

Not that I've ever submitted anything before, but based on experiences at other sites, getting throttled sucks. Having to sit and wait for the clock to reset for each subsequent submission is a pain and extremely unfriendly if the content isn't actually spam.

What if instead of rate-limiting the submissions, HN accepted all the submissions, but then controlled the rate at which they're released into the mix. That way, the user's experience is unencumbered, but there's also not a sudden flood of posts from a single user all at once?

I don't think just limitting submissions from one user would solve the spam problem, as spammers will create different accounts. Less naive ones will even use different ips, change the text of the submissions while keeping the idea, and have random delays, all of this automated.

But I agree it would be nice to have a better anti-spam technique, like those implemented by Akismet on wordpress.

I'm down with that. Thee's a (very small) number of people who abuse HN, either flooding the page with submissions or only ever submitting links from their own blog and stuff like that. It's rather annoying, though i don't know if there is a good automated solution.

Perhaps rate-limit but expand the rate per user if the links submitted are getting points. Also perhaps indicate how much time/points are remaining before a new submission can be sent.

I think a much better feature would be a "duplicate" feature.

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