You can't fix the HN problem without people. If pg really wants to preserve the feel of HN, he needs to develop a system that analyzes the behavior of users to

You can't fix the HN problem without people. If pg really wants to preserve the feel of HN, he needs to develop a system that analyzes the behavior of users to determine their acceptance level of other users. This will create a network effect, where the most influential users will drive the site. He then needs to seed the system with 5-10 users who he considers paragons of HN (I can think of five off the top of my head, but his are almost certainly different), and tweak as necessary.