One way to solve this is "subreddits," but that has a lot of its own problems (e.g. its almost impossible to start a new subreddit, even for an important distin

One way to solve this is "subreddits," but that has a lot of its own problems (e.g. its almost impossible to start a new subreddit, even for an important distinction). I always thought a Netflix-prize like mechanism, e.g. "people who voted similarly to you also liked," would be much more fine grained & much more useful than subreddits. Give PG's influence on using Bayesian classifiers (a form of machine learning) for detecting spam email, using machine learning on HN would seem to have a sympathetic ear.