The voting mechanism certainly does help, but only to a point. Imagine a "new" page where only 1 in 10 posts are worthy of upvoting (about the same as now.) Now, after some growth, imagine that changing so only 1 in 100 are valuable. Then one in a thousand. If you don't weed out bad submitters, it eventually becomes so hard to find the things that are interesting that you either start "grading on a curve" and just upvoting the best of what you can see—thus creating schlock like Reddit and Digg have—or you give up and move on to another site.

To put it in telecommunications terms: you need to keep the signal clear throughout transmission. If the clarity drops, amplifying it again (through a process like voting) will only pick up the bits that survived, and will also amplify some of the noise in the process. If we can eliminate the sources of noise, however, then we don't have to amplify.

But both signal and noise are completely subjective terms to the community. What some people may consider quality posts, others may consider that noise. That's why you need voting that reflects whether the total community considers an article signal or noise.

Perhaps the solution would come somewhere from tweaking the front page display based on votes, or even customizing displays based on past voting practices from users, but I certainly do not believe that condemning the submitter is the solution. If that were followed through, I believe that the only articles that would eventually make it through the submission process come from a community that consistently echoes back the same interests to one another, without ever deviating from the norm.

20 people upvoting it is not "many" people nor does it reflect poorly on the community as a whole. Those 20 people can't make up more than 5% of the total number of active users on HN.

No matter how hard we try, we're never going to be able to control the community's whims without literal rules. No matter how much we'd like it to be so, the Reddit/TechCrunch/Gizmodo/etc commentors are not going to "unfind" HN. All we can do is flag crappy submissions like this and hope they eventually get the point.

I disagree completely [with the second paragraph.] You're trying to force people that aren't a community, people that don't share the same interests, to enjoy only certain topics—to artificially impose community upon multiple distinct masses. It doesn't work. The only way to create a community is to ensure that the people that belong post, and the people that don't, don't. They won't "eventually get the point", because for every one person that gives up, three more will discover HN for the first time. You have to tell them the point. Otherwise, we're just doing the "community summoning" cargo cult raindance without understanding what a community is: people that impose social mores on one another to create homogeneity of interest, for the better.

Well, I didn't mean to imply that we should try to impose any sort of literal rules on the community, only that all we can do is hope most of them get the point.

How are we supposed to "tell them the point"? We can't contact this jrp fellow directly and tell him to quit submitting irrelevant articles (nor would that do a whole lot of good, methinks) - our only options right now are flagging and making pointed comments on the more egregious submissions. Either those techniques work and persuade the three new readers to toe the line, or they don't. We simply don't have much control over the masses.

Personally, I think the problem could be reduced if long-time users could downvote submissions in some way (there have to be enough people who think this is a dumb article to get it off the front page, at least). After all, the number of decent comments here far outweighs the number of crappy ones, and I'd imagine that same self-moderation dynamic would hold for submissions as well.