Meh, it's weak at best. Because HN follows zipf's law, you can fix 85% of problem just by making it more difficult to flag submissions by the top 250 or so users.
Plus it's just annoying. The yc partners are supposed to be reading applications this week, and now they have to deal with this crap.
Interesting. There was a post about different data analyzed towards Benford's law which caught my attention - about a year ago I think. Would you mind elaborating what you mean by 85% of the problem can be fixed in relations to zipf's law (I thought I was aware of the law, but perhabs I'm missing some intuition since I don't quite get your point?).
The #1 HN user has 10x as much karma as the #10 user. The #10 user has 10x more karma than the 100th user. The #100 user has 10x more than the 1000th, etc. Essentially the vast majority of highly upvoted submissions come from a tiny group of already trusted people, so by fixing the problem for just 1% of users you are actually fixing the problem for ~85% of content. It's almost impossible for a bot to make it into this group, and if they do then it's trivially easy to ban them.
Your fix is self perpetuating in a bad way. If only the top 100 users can get on the front page, only the top 100 users are going to get upvotes. It's impossible for real people to make it into this group.
Hacker news could easily be made more self sustaining for pg an co. Plenty of people would probably volunteer to be a maintainer. If not, one unobtrusive ad would probably be enough to hire one.
Plus it's just annoying. The yc partners are supposed to be reading applications this week, and now they have to deal with this crap.