I would like to put a proposition up for discussion: Lots of articles that raise interest on HN come from the same sources: 37signals, Seth Godin, Paul Graham, etc. The one who is the first to submit an article from such a popular source, gets a lot of Karma points for a safe bet. I think we should rather reward people that find interesting articles of quite unknown writers or from new sources. One way could be to automate submission of articles from popular sources. Opinions?
Karma can't be traded in for anything in the real world. Contrary to urban legend, Paul Graham does not make you a sandwich (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439129</a>). So it seems a little silly to get bent out of shape over who's getting lots of karma by submitting things.<p>More problematic seems that people are submitting stories to get karma rather than because they think they're interesting. That seems a dangerous trend. Perhaps the solution would be to nullify karma gains on such "obvious" sites.<p>However, what would suit me more would be if things were adjusted inversely to their PageRank -- meaning less stories from CNN, New York Times, BBC and so on, but things that are a little further out would be ranked better.
True, TechCrunch is another of the always-submitted sites here. It wouldn't be too hard to setup a script to automatically post to HN whenever the RSS feed is updated, so this could be done for a special user.<p>Personally, I'm not as bothered about karma on here as I am on other communities - I'm much more of a reader than a contributor - and I agree with your comment on finding "unknown writers". The more obscure articles are what I use HN for at the end of the day.
I'd vote against this. I don't think the fact that some people gain karma by being the first to post popular articles is so terrible a thing that it should be offset by auto-submiting all that stuff. Most of what 37signals post is trash, anyway... one-liners and quotes that really don't belong here.<p>If you really want to deal with the "karma problem", then make submissions from those sources karma-free - i.e. they don't influence the submitter's karma. But since I don't think that there is actually a "karma problem", I think this is a non-issue and not worth dealing with.
Perhaps instead of automatically submitting them (which would just increase the firehose nature of the "new" page) whoever submits them the first time simply makes the articles active. This will encourage people to find more rare articles.<p>For me, I like articles from joe the blogger, since I'm that guy. If I wanted Seth, 37Signals, or some such I'd just subscribe to their site (which I don't). I get the same signal-noise ratio from them as from the average blog post that has been upvoted several times. Perhaps better.