I understand that it's suppose to be an anti-flood system, but you have to do something about it because there are users who want to submit a couple of subj. one after another - if "you're submitting too fast. try resubmitting again in a little while." msg. comes why they want to submit they might not come back again to resubmit after the waiting time is over. That's because they've already moved-on from the subject or lost interest in submiting it, or just have a short attention-span. I suggest something like a queue maybe, to at least not lose the subject with the "submit too fast" msg. Is there something done about this in the rewrite I've heard about ?
I tried to "hack" reddit a few days ago and got the message, even though I had only submitted one article!<p>
By hack, I mean that I wanted my article to appear on both "business" and the root. Well for some reason once you choose "business" you can't get that checkbox that says "submit also to reddit" to be active. Although it seems to work with "programming". So I chose programming, checked the box, then re-selected the business topic. The little checkbox stayed checked, although it was dimmed. When I hit the submit button, it gives me that "submitting too fast" message.<p>
Took about an hour to figure out that the "too fast" message must be some kind of fall-through case. Once I did not "hack" the UI, the submission went through okay. I still don't know if the UI was broken or working correctly, but the error message sure could use some improvement. (as well as the UI, imo)
I wonder how much companies could benefit from a human oracle. The way HackerNews gives weight to votes is interesting and relevant.<p>First, a human marks certain users as very legit. There need only be one marker. Next, the users those marked users mod-up in the normal course of the site are added to a white-list of users that can submit at any rate. <p>This wouldn't be hard, would be completely opaque to the users, and would avoid annoying messages thrown at your most active real users.<p>There are many, many problems with reddit.
I'm going to guess it's also an anti-spam mechanism. One of the easier ways to detect spam bots is the rate at which they submit. My only other guess is that it could also be a social mechanism, where it forces users to submit higher quality articles. If a user lost interest and won't come back and submit, then it probably wasn't worth submitting.