If anything, I think it just highlights the need to separate submission and comment karma or do away with submission karma entirely. (Good) comments add to the conversation. Submitting is just pasting a link.

It's come up on HN before that popular blogs have bots running against them that post new articles to HN as soon as they appear on the RSS feed. I don't really care about the karma side of this but it encourages behaviour in some that just adds noise to HN (IMHO).

As for the polls, there have been a lot these last few days. Not excessively so but we might want to lay off for a few days. Some of the comments have been interesting. The results of the polls themselves are completely meaningless.

EDIT: to clarify, voluntary polls are meaningless. Properly conducted polls with random sampling are of course an effective tool. Of course, none of the HN polls fall into this category (hence "meaningless" in terms of results).