perspective: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog (the submitter)
The content may be(or not!) worth reading, but I'd rather have 'discovered content' please!
On the other hand, that's the whole point of social aggregation: to democratically filter the good stuff to the top. Some variation in submission is good, as long as there's not too much off-topic spam.
It's a hard balance.
Social news sites are the perfect venue for (non-advertising) bloggers to self-advertise. If someone thinks their own blog post is relevant, why not post it to hacker news? Why shouldn't a blogger think all his articles are relevant?
The spam is when "every" post comes in.
Really, we do need a way to custom-query news.yc so we can see the effects of prototype filters. Any way to do it already in existence?
What's the point of the "New" heading if it isn't a firehose of stuff that the community on HN think might be interesting? Why would I be annoyed by whatever appeared there?
Now when yahoos keep voting up material from the same famous people (and I'm not referring to PG) then THAT kind of fanboy stuff gets annoying -- much more annoying that somebody who likes writing and wants to share.
I write one article a week or so. Most of it is technical. So I submit them here. Sometimes I submit other stuff.
But I don't worry about how much material I'm submitting of my own vs other sites. There's nothing magical about "discovery" In fact, it's really not discovered at all until the community decides they like it (or not). That's the entire point of why the board exists.