We have these things because people repost them from Reddit. If you ever want some karma, you can do the same.

Why does it matter where the stories were found? Are they somehow less interesting because they have been on other sites?

You're right. I suspect there are users here who have semi-automated the process too. It seems like a fun project (from a technical perspective) to create a HN "bot" that gets as much karma as possible without getting caught - but I fear pg's wrath more than such a project would be worth in karma ;-)

If inducing such wrath would get pg to fix the problem, then I'd happily spend my spring break on it.

Please don't. If you want to spend your time on this, start by finding evidence that there is even a problem.

Look at all the crap on the front page these days, and the snarky comments with 50 upvotes. HN is looking more and more like reddit. I come here to get away from reddit.

I've seen this happen in many places - any unmoderated, semi-anonymous online community of geeks eventually devolves into 4chan. reddit is basically there at this point; HN is not, but it's certainly moving in that direction.

In all seriousness, would it be helpful for me to compile a list of the articles and comments I'm talking about?

In all seriousness, producing a blog post/report/whatever on the perceived issues and then submitting it to HN would probably yield the best results. Controversial comments in deep places like this tend to do poorly with the karma points.

I don't see it as a problem to be solved. I visit /new a lot and I think the anti-spam stuff here is working pretty well (compared to a lot of community link sites). If anyone is auto submitting stuff, then it all comes down to people flagging it or voting it up as to whether it sinks or swims. Ultimately, the democratic process wins out on HN.