I don't think it is unreasonable to ask people to invest time in the community before they can request the community to invest time evaluating their product.
With that said, I have learned a ton here and HN is easily the best resource I have ever found on any subject.
edit:
Potential solution: require participation in other user's RMS before you can post your own RMS. Even though I am non technical and don't have much entrepreneurial experience, I can still give an opinion from the view of a customer.
This hasn't really bothered me, until the average karma/post started getting shown, which showed me that I get upvotes on less than half the things I say. Now that pg is also pointing out the correlation between new accounts and undesirables, I'm worried about...something (not sure what).
> Awesome App! 5 stars! Get paid apps 100% free from xyz.com!
If you are generally clever and motivated, there's few situations where you won't have input. Even asking well structure questions to learn on a topic is a good contribution, and can help people out.
OTOH, if you say stuff that's considered interesting here, you are probably not trying to sucker us into reviewing your app.
Crowdsourcing RMS spam control sounds like it could work well. Like how investors stake their reputation by inviting other co-investors, established HN'ers would have something to lose if they posted RMS spam.
As an aside, how would we distinguish between RMS posts and regular posts? Would the spammers simply revert to normal posts? I think if this is the case then perhaps we should reconsider the goal.
If the goal is to stop spam masquerading as RMS, then it seems to me that accounts should require more longevity or community contribution to post an RMS post than a regular post. As long as we define etiquette for posting an RMS post, then it should be feasible to use a combination of following that etiquette, and flagging posts that don't follow said etiquette.
If the issue is stopping spam, then perhaps that's separate to RMS posts and should be considered as a wider whole.
I care about other people's startups, but not spam.
sleep( n * 86400 )
The only problem here is a spammer that creates a ton of accounts and then uses them all at once after the 60 day threshold.