The worrying thing is that when things start to go bad they go bad fast because the system is self-reinforcing in two different ways:
1) When people see lame stories make the front page, they see that they can submit lame stories and have them make the front page.
2) When you submit a good story and it doesn't make the front page then it's kind of depressing. And what kind of people still bother to submit content when that happens? Sucky people.
There have always been lots of bad submissions. The real problem is voting, not submission. People aren't so much submitting worse stuff as upvoting worse stuff.
And the danger of that is worse than just encouraging bad submitters or discouraging good ones. It makes the site seem to be about dumber stuff. Seem because it is now about dumber stuff.
Can you put up a vote weighted page on an alternate URL, if the vote weighting implementation is ready to be turned on? In the past you've said that with vote weighting on the front page looks mostly the same, I think many of us are curious if that is still true.
"And what kind of people still bother to submit content when that happens?"
Entrepreneurs.
This forum is a metaphor for a startup itself. You have good days and you have other days. So what do you do? You KEEP ON SUBMITTING. You perservere.
Personally, I have reached "Hacker News Addiction, Phase II". Every time I read something somewhere else, I want to know what you guys think. So I submit it. And usually, no one comments. But I also understand that I don't really have much control over this, so I just keep submitting. And keep voting. And you should, too. Don't let the "lamemakers" take over your site. Just keep doing your thing and they'll be moving along soon enough.
I strongly agree with #2. I usually stick to contributing comments because I don't want some of my favorite stories I've come across (which I have not yet submitted) to get buried (and unable to be submitted later because of duplicates).
Did any stories about the end of the 700mhz spectrum auction make it up? It's not a good sign that something that big gets missed over by the community.
Yeah, I submitted that a couple days ago and no one voted that up.
I think that if you come to depend on hacker news for your news, then you only visit the front page, and stop visiting the new pages. And given that you can upvote on the front page, people just do it there, rather than peruse through the new articles and upvoting them. So what you end up with is that an article just needs 2 or 3 votes to make it on the front page, and then there's a positive feedback effect. This makes it more of a hit or miss sort of thing for articles. I think if you can only vote when you're on the new scenes page, it might help.
Then submit it again. Maybe the people that would have been interested in that story were too busy working to visit the "new" page during the 4 hours it was there.
1) When people see lame stories make the front page, they see that they can submit lame stories and have them make the front page.
2) When you submit a good story and it doesn't make the front page then it's kind of depressing. And what kind of people still bother to submit content when that happens? Sucky people.