A related thing: what about considering the number of people who clicked on the article or comments links in addition (or even instead of) to the number of upvo

A related thing: what about considering the number of people who clicked on the article or comments links in addition (or even instead of) to the number of upvotes? For article links, it can be tracked with navigator.sendBeacon for recent browsers with JavaScript enabled, and a server-side redirect otherwise. There is some risk of promoting click-bait this way though, so might need to be careful and provide an "undo upvote" or downvote button, and perhaps find some click-bait-related signals to hedge against (maybe time until next action on HN, titles with lots of generic words, similarity to Buzzfeed headlines, etc.).