Respectfully, I disagree. The points are clearly correlated with how high the item gets, and how long it stays on the front page. As such, I think the ranking

Respectfully, I disagree. The points are clearly correlated with how high the item gets, and how long it stays on the front page. As such, I think the ranking is of value. It also has the merit of being simple to compute, and easy to explain. Elegant.