2) I don't think most spammers care about karma anyway, and will likely just continue to submit junk. I think well meaning newbies might be either turned off by it, or try to game it (e.g., make accounts with 3 friends, constantly vote up each others submissions so they always get 2 votes, and always have enough karma to keep submitting.)
Personally, I like the idea of rate limiting. Seems totally reasonable to me that until you have interacted with the community, you shouldn't clog up the news page. How do you get around people making 50 accounts a day to submit 50 stories a day? I don't think we have scale yet to worry about that sort of problem. At that point, we'll have to ban users, websites, ip addresses in some fashion
I think the issue right now though is not so much that it is overrun with spammers - just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's appropriate. Case in point: I know I have submitted a couple stories that I thought were HN worthy, but that people called me on in the comments (Alabama Fat Tax, for instance). I still thought it was relevant, but I had the self restraint to only submit occasionally anyway. Someone with similar taste to me without such self restraint is the issue that I think we need to solve, and rate limiting does that job admirably (I think).
I agree with issue #1, but the other solutions (minimum karma of 100 or something like this) would have the same problem. Regarding your issue #2, I think users with negative karmas would have to be disallowed submitting in order to stop spammers.
"just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's appropriate."
Basically my idea was that you have to prove you know about HN-culture by writing good comments, and then by gaining karma you can start submitting.
1) Keynesian beauty contest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
2) I don't think most spammers care about karma anyway, and will likely just continue to submit junk. I think well meaning newbies might be either turned off by it, or try to game it (e.g., make accounts with 3 friends, constantly vote up each others submissions so they always get 2 votes, and always have enough karma to keep submitting.)
Personally, I like the idea of rate limiting. Seems totally reasonable to me that until you have interacted with the community, you shouldn't clog up the news page. How do you get around people making 50 accounts a day to submit 50 stories a day? I don't think we have scale yet to worry about that sort of problem. At that point, we'll have to ban users, websites, ip addresses in some fashion
I think the issue right now though is not so much that it is overrun with spammers - just overrun with relatively well intentioned people who don't know what's appropriate. Case in point: I know I have submitted a couple stories that I thought were HN worthy, but that people called me on in the comments (Alabama Fat Tax, for instance). I still thought it was relevant, but I had the self restraint to only submit occasionally anyway. Someone with similar taste to me without such self restraint is the issue that I think we need to solve, and rate limiting does that job admirably (I think).