I've had a number of submission woes that mirror yours. Just KNOWING that people would like it if they saw it (right or wrong,) but seeing how quickly things move from newest to gone is the big worry.
The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.
If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.
The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.
If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.