[collegeportalme]

Ha. This is a classic community phenomenon. You can also notice this in Foursquare, Twitter, and almost every other community based site. I think us as a community need to start encouraging progressive and meaningful arguments, rather than just the top news. I would like to come to HN to have a conversation/ discussion about something new rather than a link to NYT.

One idea would be to create separate sections for discussions, news, blog links, at all.

[pestaa]

And how would that discourage the behavior of autosubmitting?

The speed in which new URLs are submitted by the same user should be limited according to their karma. (Assuming users with high points are trustworthy, which is the primary reason this metric is made for.)

[mkr-hn]

New users could start with a 24 hour limit between submissions (86,400 seconds) and get 20 seconds removed for every karma point. Someone with 2000 karma would be able to submit every 12.8 hours. By 4000 you've probably learned that quality beats quantity.

[mnutt]

That seems fair, though it might be better to use average story karma. The bots in question probably have a fair amount of karma just from the sheer number of stories submitted.

[mkr-hn]

Multiply the value by their average. It boosts overall submission quality automatically by giving better commenters more chances for a front page article.

edit: Though the value would need to be much lower than 20 per karma with that modifier. My average of 2.73 with 2011 karma would let me post as much as I want.

karma * 3.7 * average would come to around 20,000 for me. That would let me submit an article every 18 hours.