We're open to suggestions about how to get the balance better. We do need to balance it somehow.
At the risk of suggesting the site become more like reddit, the site should maybe become a scosh more like reddit. Since the HN community has become more diverse in its interests than the structure of the site was perhaps intended for, it needs to be possible to group posts not just by votes, but contextually, either with tags or through sub-boards. This wouldn't necessarily have to affect the way the site appears to function[0], for users who like things the way they are now - but users who want to see more NSA related content could choose (maybe through their account page) to have NSA related content bubble up for them, regardless of their actual gravity.
[0] although to prevent certain stories from overwhelming the site anyway, it might be necessary to sort the frontpage by trending tags/groups when multiple stories of the same type exist... I don't know.
Furthermore, I think it might help to alleviate the suspicions of people like discostrings if there were some automatic feedback to actually show the effect of user/mod flags on a thread over time... surely "mostly killed by user flags" is something that could be graphed somewhere.
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At the risk of suggesting the site become more like reddit, the site should maybe become a scosh more like reddit. Since the HN community has become more diverse in its interests than the structure of the site was perhaps intended for, it needs to be possible to group posts not just by votes, but contextually, either with tags or through sub-boards. This wouldn't necessarily have to affect the way the site appears to function[0], for users who like things the way they are now - but users who want to see more NSA related content could choose (maybe through their account page) to have NSA related content bubble up for them, regardless of their actual gravity.
[0] although to prevent certain stories from overwhelming the site anyway, it might be necessary to sort the frontpage by trending tags/groups when multiple stories of the same type exist... I don't know.
Furthermore, I think it might help to alleviate the suspicions of people like discostrings if there were some automatic feedback to actually show the effect of user/mod flags on a thread over time... surely "mostly killed by user flags" is something that could be graphed somewhere.