[dang]

> how do I distinguish between someone who was asked to re-post, and someone who is making multiple submissions for, say, self-promotional reason?

For the time being, you have to tell that by looking at the articles and the account's submission history. It's usually pretty easy to spot self-promotion. Keep in mind, though, that self-promotion per se isn't against the spirit of the site; uninteresting content is.

Also, we modified the FAQ to make it clear that when a story hasn't had much attention yet, a small number of reposts is ok. The point of all of this is try to mitigate the weaknesses of /newest as a mechanism for recognizing good stories.

[waterlesscloud]

One of the more frustrating aspects of submitting stories is finding out someone submitted the same story hours (or days) ago and it only garnered a few karma. In that situation, there's no hope of the story getting much attention even though multiple people found it interesting enough to submit. The karma is just spread out over too long a time for the algorithm to raise up the story.

I can imagine you need to defend against rings of people submitting the same spam story over time, but maybe if a few established users are submitting a story, its rank could be raised more than the karma/time ratio alone would indicate.

[dang]

I agree, and it's one reason why we want to make a better dupe detection system. We did look at changing that particular behavior but it turned out to be hard to do in isolation.

[weaksauce]

you could have a feature on the front page that takes 3 stories from the new feed an displays them at the bottom of the front page for users that are above some "wisdom karma threshold" similar to the downvote threshold. if you want to provide some checks and balances to the 3 stories you could include one that is flagkilled but is not distinguished as such to the user and see what the user does with that story.

You can also have stories with more text behind them as an indicator of quality. While long stories could be gamed, I think it's a decently helpful metric of quality as most spammers are lazy enough not to write a long article. not a perfect metric but something to consider.