I don't expect this comment to get read, it's likely buried under the 100+ already here, but here is my two cents on the subject...

Chasing spammers with greater and greater automated systems inevitably starts catching real people in the net. People that don't know they are in the net and people who otherwise contributed to the community, get enraged at the fact that their contributions are obviously being ignored.

Over time, the only people that get through the ever-growing net of automated spam blocking are smaller and smaller, eventually turning the site into an effort driven by a small group of users so highly rated that the spam algorithm simply doesn't look at them anymore. In Digg v3 parlance "super users".

Digg had one of the most advanced anti-spam algorithms in social news for 3.0 and they STILL couldn't control it as the site became dominated by a few select people that has escaped the initial watchful eye of the spam-algorithms.

Once their "rep" was high enough, they became impervious to getting knocked down by it.

Unfortunately for all the new users, there was no hope unless they played EXACTLY by the rules of this nebulous anti-spam algorithm that no one was able to tell if it was doing a good job or not... unless you had people manually review the spam submissions all day long which is impossible at this volume.

The net-net of these honey pot and highly advanced ideas is that you catch a lot of decent people in the net and they have no way of getting out.

That is a lot of time spent on fighting a battle that isn't really the right focal point.

The reality is as this sites popularity grows, submissions and comments are going to get more normalized. That is the nature of folding more and more people into the mix.

That isn't spam, that is human nature.

Create a group (of any kind, like organizing birthday parties) of 3 people and see how it performs and behaves. Now add 40 people to it... it will be significantly less efficient and more "spammy" with stupid email forwards and questions about international deserts being "appropriate".

This isn't spam, this is just the nature of a much larger group.

If you deploy a spam algorithm and start muting half those people, you might knock out some of the distracting emails (at least ones that the person writing the spam filter deems distracting) but you also piss off half the group that goes elsewhere to contribute.

Digg v4 took this to an extreme and we saw what happened with their community. Reddit still plays by their original rules even though they dominate the social news sector with traffic and they manage just fine.

If HN was crushed by pharma submissions and link bait I'd say we have a problem, but traffic seems to continue to grow and I haven't seen any obvious degradation in the last year.

I am sure that HN of today is much different than HN of 3 years ago, but that doesn't necessarily mean worse. If the people complaining about HN's quality really mean they just want a different type of elite site that isn't open to all this riff-raff (I consider myself riff-raff), that is a lot different problem than spam-blocking.

This idea that every submission should be amazing and every comment will make you cry because of its intelligence is not realistic.

The site is fine.