> So, community: what should we do?

My diagnosis is that the friction that existed before (the effort to create a project) was filtering out low-effort projects and keeping the amount of submissions within the capacity the community to handle. Now that the friction is greatly reduced, there's more low-effort content and it's beyond the community's capacity (which is the real problem).

So there's two options: increase the amount of friction or increase the capacity. I don't think the capacity options are very attractive. You could add tags/categories to create different niches/queues. The most popular tags would still be overwhelmed but the more niche ones would prosper. I wouldn't mind that but I think it goes against the site's philosophy so I doubt you'll be interested.

So what I would propose is to create a heavier submission process.

- Make it so you may only submit 1 Show HN per week.

- Put it into a review queue so that it isn't immediately visible to everyone.

- Users who are eligible to be reviewers (maybe their account is at least a year old with, maybe they've posted to Show HN at least once) can volunteer to provide feedback (as comments) and can approve of the submission.

- If it gets approved by N people, it gets posted.

- If the submitter can't get the approvals they need, they can review the feedback and submit again next week.

High effort projects should sail through. Projects that aren't sufficently effortful or don't follow the Show HN guidelines (eg it's account walled) get the opportunity to apply more polish and try again.

A note on requirements for reviewers: A lot of the best comments come from people with old accounts who almost never post and so may have less than 100 karma. My interpretation is that these people have a lot of experience but only comment when they have an especially meaningful contribution. So I would suggest having requirements for account age (to make it more difficult to approve yourself from a sockpuppet) but being very flexible with karma.