Non-news: historically, hackernews was startup news, which then expanded to "gratifying intellectual curiosity." I'd like to split the "new" and the "interestin

Non-news: historically, hackernews was startup news, which then expanded to "gratifying intellectual curiosity." I'd like to split the "new" and the "interesting", rather like how newspapers have a magazine-like section on weekends. Some of the most popular articles are quite old as you note. eg Feynmann stuff. Your idea would work well for this. But I doubt anything so drastic will be trialled... though dang seems a lot more willing to experiment than pg was, so maybe it's possible, if we can think of an effective yet low-cost way to test it? BTW there is a hidden lower-gravity version, https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best (but of course most votes aren't made using it, so it doesn't test the idea). I agree blind upvoting is a bad idea, though I read the plea as "if you are already a fan of our work, please upvote early". In practice, the super-short story commented ("the little gods") is probably the best way to go - a quick way to evaluate the offering (which incidentally is what I did before upvoting).