I was about to suggest the exact same thing, so I totally agree with the CAPTCHA solution.
And maybe having a (daily?) article submission limit per user at the same time would keep people from submitting articles just for the sake of it.
It crossed my mind allowing users with more karma to have higher submission limits, but that might aswel be gamed at some point by some users.
So perhaps the best thing is having a CAPTCHA to avoid bot submissions and some kind of limit to avoid manual spamming.
Truth is, HN article quality has been slowly declining in the last few months and we keep seeing the same sources over and over again on the front page.
a) It is hard enough to submit from a smartphone already. Much of my news browsing is on my phone while cooking and eating my breakfast.
b) Adding a CAPTCHA at this point seems like a big hammer to solve an small problem, one that was solved by jacquesm (at least this time) via a little detective work and personal contact (thanks for the deft handling of the situation, Jacques).
c) PG already does voting ring detection, it seems like autosubmitbots should be detectable too if this becomes a problem again.
ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day.
This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
That would at least slow down the bots based on how attentive the maintainers are. There are of course captcha solving services but this just trades maintainer time for money - trying to run a successful karma hoarding bot would still be death by a thousand papercuts.
Submitting content for sake of karma is spamming, no matter who wrote the content. Why not share with others something you think they will find useful or noteworthy? People tend to ask themselves first WIIFM and if they find the benefit, they share. Let us remember that sharing is about others.
Users do have to be logged in to submit articles, so action could be taken against people (or bots) that submitted too many articles that were made dead or did not receive a large number of points.
This is true, but its also true that a lot of times these bots will get to these articles first, and then because they come from a well-known or respected domain, they just get tons of upvotes anyways.
There's two separate problems: too much dead content, which imo, is ok, because the good stuff will usually rise to the top - you need some junk to find the gems; and bots automatically picking up and submitting content - no human discernment as to whether the link is actually HN-worthy. I think the mindlessness is more the issue being addressed here
