Ask HN: What is a reasonable rate to submit stories to HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is a reasonable rate to submit stories to HN?

6 pointsDanBC9 comments

Is there any limit or checking of how many stories people submit each day?

I ask because a small number of people submit very many articles.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=daegloe)

88 posts in one day.

I have much more of a problem with accounts submitting every story from large-ish websites; for instance, "IT World Magazine" has had a series of accounts that do exactly that, most recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bdking

Similarly, a small core group of people seems to be feeding Bitcoin stories, and another core group feeding Torrentfreak stuff.

The site would be better if the heaviest and/or most consistent/homogenous submitters submitted less.

Here I thought you were going to mention stupid mathema-tricks, but that's only an average of about 2 posts per days.

If the links are good, then I don't see a problem. But I looked at daegloe's postings. I followed only one of the first 75 links; the rest were boring on sight, and helps drown out the things I like. That one exception was to comment that the linked-to article was missing the point.

How effective is flagging at changing posting behavior?

If you flag too many stories you lose the flag option permanently.

Currently I flag obvious SEO pages (most of the foreign language posts are SEO) and mathema-tricks. Perhaps 10 a day?

I don't know what the threshold is, I just know I lost it months ago.

I'd like to see submissions limited to 4 or 5 a day although that doesn't really solve the problem of people just dumping generic 'safe' links to scab karma or conceal whatever they're actually spamming or to build their social networking cred or whatever their motive.

There was a suggestion earlier today to just do away with submission karma, I think that has a lot of merit. Domain limits could be interesting as well, it'd force people to at least be more creative than just spewing the usual tech rags' links.

More than 5 times a day, and I question whether I'm adding value or fishing for karma. 88/day is abusive; I flag behavior like that when I see it.

I wish I could give credit to the person who said it in a comment, when one previous username was observed over-submitting from all the hot, karma-grabbing sites. The basic rule of thumb is that the submitter of a link should have had time to READ the link and to verify that it is a worthwhile link that will advance the discussion here and inform interested readers. I am a high-submission user here, and that is the rule I try to impose on myself.

It may be that the site already has some automated defenses against any one account submitting too often, but we have recently been observing some breaches in those defenses, it appears.

Sorry guys, got carried away today!

I was home sick all day and spent the better part of 15 restless hours scouring the net and feeding my brain. I was collecting noteworthy links along the way, and generally posted (what I considered to be) the good ones in clusters as I returned to HN.

The inundation of knowledge, boredom and medication seemed to have triggered a bit of irrational exuberance. Not my typical posting activity as you can see by my submission history. It's back to the office tomorrow, which means I'll return to my normal 2 or 3 posts a day.

Apologies if I offended. Lesson learned.

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