Ah thanks, that's what I wanted to know. It's nice to know there's a procedure for this, and I hope the workaround isn't too straightforward for anyone looking to abuse the system.
Do you know if the submission privilege revoking is done automatically or by a moderator?
Generally, when you see abuse on HN, the right thing to do is send an
email to hn@ycombinator.com rather than post it publicly.
I've recently been trying to work out simple but useful heuristics to
just detect this kind of abuse without creating too much load. Since I
don't have access to all of the data, it's mostly been observation and
keeping notes.
Automating just detection of the most obvious abuses is feasible and
fairly straight forward, but automating action is somewhere between
difficult and nigh impossible.
The reason is simple; there are many great HN users who will regularly
submit links to their own work, like blog posts. In fact, a few of the
folks on the HN leader board [1] will share their own work fairly
regularly (ColinWright, DanielBMarkham, jgrahamc, ..., and in years long
past, also patio11, jacquesm, ...). Of course, when they submit their
own stuff, it's usually really interesting, and they also submit other
interesting stuff from other sites (not their own).
I think it's an alert that is sent to a mod, but could be wrong - I had this happen to me a while back when I posted too much from my own blog. Any user that submits an inordinate amount of articles from any one site (regardless of their affiliation with that site it seems) will have their articles marked dead on submission, but may be able to get that lifted by the mods with a warning to spread their submissions around a bit.
If you have showdead on, here's a blatant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=TheSurge