This also serves the dual purpose of focusing attention on discussion, which I believe is the most important part of this site. It'd be an interesting system to try, if only to see how it turns out.
The number of new submissions correlates with the number of users. Number of users correlates with number of people looking at and voting on the "new" page.
Shouldn't the upvotes be based on the merit of the post, not that of the poster?
I mean, what if you submit 3 stories and only the first gets published on that day. But someone else submits your third story as their one for the day and it becomes the most popular item on HN that day. Suddenly you're annoyed because you think you should have gotten those points.
Maybe you could have a queue but if someone else submits a story you got to first and was queued than you both get the karma points. There's nothing that says only one person can have the points for one story added to their total.
Pardon my French, but who gives a shit? I'm more than happy for people who post for karma to be annoyed. The reward of posting an interesting article should be the discussion that follows. I'd much rather see rules for the good of the community than rules that play to individuals' vanity.
The reality is that we don’t know how many good stories are submitted by those people trying to boost their karma points. Nor do we know for a fact that finding good stories is easy. So by taking those points away the community would risk lessening its effectiveness.
In fact, I’d argue that’s the most likely outcome. In my experience people work more effectively when they are being rewarded for their actions. That in mind I’d consider it more likely that those chasing points are the ones submitting the best story. So taking away the points for submitting stories could deprive the community of some of its best conversation pieces.
I could be wrong but since there’s no way to prove that either way
While the quality of discussion here is almost unrivaled (Business Spectator's conversation section is the HN of APAC business), not everyone is here for the discussion. This site is unrivaled as a news aggregator.
Why is a discussion worth more than a submission? Typically a great submission leads to an even greater discussion, but this is not always the case. And sure, we occasionally see low value articles accumulate a lot of points, but the same can be said for the odd low value comment.
not the same, always voted up, uber-submitters
With the exception of PG, who has long since removed himself from the leader board, we don't really see this too much.