That's a fair point. I wrote the post as a reaction to an off-topic article that I saw on the front page. That's not to say that the overall quality of HN isn't

That's a fair point. I wrote the post as a reaction to an off-topic article that I saw on the front page. That's not to say that the overall quality of HN isn't superb, but I was just particularly upset that a glaringly off-topic article was so highly upvoted. This is a general system, however, and certainly addresses a problem which many other social news sites suffer from. I can imagine reddit implementing something like this, for instance. Thus, I think even if one believes it may be overkill for HackerNews (at the moment), it's an important contribution to the question of how to properly and automatically moderate social news sites.