I too have noticed a large increase in volume recently, but I'm not sure that's the problem. Rather, I'd say the site needs less churn - top articles should stay on the front page for at least a day. That just means a different ranking, maybe something like log(votes)*weight, where weight decays over time but gets bumped at each upvote.

If that's not enough churn for some people, I'd prefer a filter that lets them temporarily hide some stories. And ten there's /newest

I know there's also the /best section, but it's not linked to and I don't know how it's ranked.

A reddit-like url filter would help a little in catching reposts, but I'm not sure this is a big problem yet.