I think story submission should require 50-100 points or karma and/or a week or two of membership. It's a kind or rite of passage, participate in the community and you can contribute stories. Be around long enough to observe the culture.
and what about the person who has an AMAZING story but just joined?
I realize that we have these issues, but anything that's not going to make it take way too long for people to be able to submit isn't going to help the signal/noise ratio much.
It's kind of presumptuous and pompous to assume that just because someone hasn't been on HN, they don't know hacker culture through some other means. HN may be "hacker news," but plenty of hackers aren't on HN (even though it may seem as if everyone is on HN now).
And the more emphasis we put on karma, the more people will do things with the intent of enhancing their karma rather than enhancing the discussion.
It would certainly cut down on a lot of garbage. Most of the posts I flag (mostly spam links) are from users who have only been registered for a few minutes.
On the other hand, you could have long-time lurkers with no karma that are unable to submit and that could be a problem. You couldn't base it on length of time registered instead of karma either because then spammers would register accounts and sit on them before submitting garbage.
> you could have long-time lurkers with no karma that are unable to submit and that could be a problem
I think think that's a problem. If someone is just a lurker they aren't really fully a member of the community the way a poster is. And when has posted plenty of comments, gotten up-arrows for some and down-arrows for others, they have a better idea of what community standards are.
As a lurker, I sort of agree. That is, I don't think that I'm a real part of the community - being more the type to hang around the edges, listening to the conversation - but I think that that is a valid way of figuring out community standards; watching other people try, and seeing what works. So yes, I'm sort of biased against restricting article submission based on points and comments.
On the other hand, neither do I expect to submit anything very soon, so I suppose that not being able to wouldn't matter much to me (until I want to submit something, of course). It would be quite interesting to see statistics for who submits articles, and how many comments / points they have, and how long they have been a member.
25 would be good. 50 is a long way. I'm was at 221 4 weeks back and I'm still at 232. (I don't comment on threads that I don't understand) and there are many like who are doing it this way. So keeping the posting threshold as low as 25 would be nice.
What happens if this guy heard from someone that people here give good feedback abt his new idea or startup? Should he wait for long (like 2-3 weeks to get 25 or 50 points) to get feedback? So I'm a bit biased about having posting thresholds for new threads.
I think that would help reduce the volume and increase S/N. To address the hidden-jems problem, another idea would be to randomly serve up the second page (Page 2 of the front page), giving the hidden-gems a better chance to make it to the first page.
