[mindcrime]

My personal, subjective, non-official interpretation, based on my experience here over the years:

If you're submitting (a) link(s) to your own stuff everyday, it's probably going to raise eyebrows. If you submit your own stuff once a week, it's probably going to raise eyebrows. If you're submitting your own stuff once a month, I doubt anybody would much notice or care. If you're submitting your own stuff once every couple of months or so, you're probably fine.

Again, totally non-official, but I think that's a useful approximation.

[dvaun]

I'd like to add to this.

> If you submit your own stuff once a week, it's probably going to raise eyebrows.

I browse /new frequently and come across self-promoting accounts constantly[0]. It may depend on dang having time to remove these submissions and other users to flag them.

[0]: As an example, I came across this user yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aogl there are plenty of others who do this as well

[gus_massa]

That example is in the border, but it's not annoying enough and can fly under the radar. I'd not be surprised if it get's banned eventually.

* Once every two days, so people don't remember.

* Not exact repost, so people don't remember.

* The post are too short, but not completely off-topic.

* Not obvious suckpuppets or similar activity.

Note that this is not a foolproof recipe. As I said before, it's not annoying enough and can fly under the radar. I'd not be surprised if it get's banned eventually.

[dvaun]

I agree with each of your bullet points.

There is quite a bit of good content that never makes it to the front page. Having less muck to sift through would be nice :) however, this is just a symptom of HN steadily growing more popular...

[Normille]

Here's another one I've noticed. Only ever posts links to his own website articles. Sometimes multiple times a day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=iafrikan

[dvaun]

Personally, it irks me that a lot of these submissions get posted because it adds to the list of posts that I have to weed through in order to find the gems.

I've been making it a point to flag submissions—more often—when they do violate the guidelines (resubmissions, political/can be discussed elsewhere, etc.)

[Normille]

Those and the endless duplicate submissions of the same story, by people too lazy to spare the couple of seconds needed to check whether it's already been submitted [often several times!].

I browse HN by the '/newest' page, so every time something hits the news I see it repeated over and over again on the first few pages. Even though people assure me that the HN software filters out duplicates, it's simply not true

As regards the spammy and/or junk submissions; I use a TamperMonkey script that allows me to add domains to a blacklist and sets those submissions to 'display:none'. So that allows me to pre-filter what shows up on the page.