I remember the early days of digg and people tend to see social news sites as a mechanism to get a wave of traffic. What they don't always think about is providing value to the social sites.
HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted.
The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter.
The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page.
I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites).
Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.
HN is probably better than most about not letting much crap on the home page, but these sites are almost universally terrible at surfacing new content so that it has a good opportunity to get up voted.
The selfish human response is to get your friends to vote for you (just like you get your friends to vote for you in real life actually). It's just that there are so few actual people looking at the submitted stories that it wouldn't take much to astroturf your way on to the front page without a voting ring filter.
The best solution is very likely to have a better interface for surfacing submitted stories to a wider audience. Or, incentivize people to actually look at the new section. Maybe extra points for voting or commenting before it hits front page.
I don't think it would take much to solve this problem, but this isn't a policy or filter problem, it's a human problem and your system needs to work with the user psychology that naturally exists on HN (and similar sites).
Reddit seemed to solve this by making subreddits a bigger part of the site, but I don't know how HN would incorporate such an idea without losing the site identity.