Just for the sake of argument, is there a better metric here?

I don't think so. "Ignore users until the community circlejerks you to the top" is not a useful metric as yesterday's adventures were largely driven by Redditors celebrating other Redditors in a "fuck the man over here until we feel like going back over there" frame of mind. It also drowns out unpopular opinions, which are things I like to see, believe it or not.

I also really don't want a fixed setting, as I suspect we'll be done with this current crew of tire kickers by Sunday, whereas the SRS invasion took a good week or two to burn out.

I mentioned this to TNG, I'll mention it to you: Give me two sliders, one that says "older than" and another that says "younger than." let me specify a range. It's then no longer about "censorship" it's about finding another avenue into the data.

Another thing we use automoderator for - sampling. Over in /r/movies we had Automoderator report anyone with over 100k comment karma because we were interested in seeing whether or not /r/centuryclub was having an effect on our content the way they were in /r/askreddit. Note that we didn't do anything - we just wanted a highlighter. What we discovered is that the centuryclub posse largely swooped in on fast rising threads, largely said circlejerky things to each other, and then left, without interacting with our community one iota: in other words, they existed in their own splendiferous bubble of irrelevance and harmed no one.

You can learn a lot about Hubski by poking around Hubski. I'm asking for another instrument. Do this: Code it up for yourself and see what you see. Take notes. Then do it again in a week. Lemme know what you learn.