Rating without looking at the underlying content is horrible. Perhaps it could be mitigated by tracking if the link was followed, weighting authenticated upvote

Rating without looking at the underlying content is horrible. Perhaps it could be mitigated by tracking if the link was followed, weighting authenticated upvotes more heavily than unauthenticated ones (where "authenticated" means a click-through to the content was observed). You could track a link click either by setting a cookie client-side with javascript, or by linking to a trampoline page on HN that tracks the click, then redirects to the real URL.