[mquander]

It's almost impossible to get some self-balancing system of karma incentives to work out exactly right. But we don't need to do that. There are lots of smart, thoughtful humans here who will work for free or cheap in good faith to keep things right. Why do we refuse to enlist their service?

Basically, just straight up steal the Metafilter model of non-shitty content.

- Five bucks for an account. Maybe ten.

- Tell the mods to actually moderate discussion (instead of spending their time changing good post titles to terrible post titles.) If there aren't enough mods, then ask for more. There needs to be someone keeping discussion on-topic and civil.

- Self-links are OK only if they are really good. If someone sits around posting every post on their blog to HN (or having their buddy do it) ban them. We need less borderline-spam content on the "New" page.

- Is this supposed to be "Hacker News" or "News"? If the former, actually enforce it. Kill flamebait posts, political posts, recent dupe posts, and non-tech/startup-related posts on sight. If someone does nothing but post crappy, off-topic articles, ban them.

How do you prevent the abuse and evasion of all these vague rules? Easy. You retain good moderators with community transparency of moderator decisions to keep them honest. It works.

[larrys]

"Self-links are OK only if they are really good. If someone sits around posting every post on their blog to HN (or having their buddy do it) "

Along those lines I'm wondering why a few words by the OP on this subject simply asking a question and offering nothing more deserves to be on the front page.

The OP is Josh Miller (by handle) who works at branch.com where the simplistic post appears.

This essentially appears to be publicity for branch.com.

[bpatrianakos]

I think you're right about the publicity thing and I'm torn as to whether it's okay or not. On the one hand we're all here to support each other in building things and all that plus this really was a good way to show the HN crowd how Branch is used/useful which I know would appeal to a lot of us. There's no doubt having a guy from Branch post a Branch here is a great way to get people using it and talking about it. But then again it also feels a bit sneaky and just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If we give him the benefit of the doubt we can assume that because he's involved with Branch he uses it and also wanted to pose a question to HN so in the end his use of Branch would seem just this side of innocent. If we don't give him the benefit of the doubt then I'm not sure it was right. I do give the benefit of the doubt though, personally.

As to whether it belongs on the front page... Well technically the front page is a reflection of this community. If its on the front page then it belongs there because it was voted onto it. You don't have to look any further than the front page to tell how HN is changing for better or worse. But I do know what you mean when you say "deserves" and yeah, I'm right there with you.