I commend the research. I've also thought about what/how to increase signal/noise and sort-of came to the realization that it's not well defined or solvable for a broad range of interest like HN.

You perhaps have an idea of what "deeply important" might look like. I have a vague idea of what "technically interesting" looks like, and wondered how that could be curated. Perhaps the fastest way to bootstrap a particular sensibility is for one person to manually curate, allowing anyone with similar interests to consume. Eventually some of the top aligned commenters could also curate.

The basic premise of the approach is based on the observation that as an audience grows large, so does the diversity of topics, and unfortunately the quality across the board decreases as signal for one topic is noise for another.

This idea of estimating a referendum (elected mods, statistical sampling, referendum) looks like an approach that could possibly keep on working as numbers grow and keep things 'on topic'. That depends on the mods having more of a say since an actual or accurately estimated referendum will dilute/diversify with growth.

My thoughts on curating for different interests was to imagine 'tags' that could be crowdsourced and each reader could choose a percentage or max number of posts per tag. The first 'dumb thing that could work' that I applied was regexs into sections so all the 'Covid-19' news, etc could be separate from niche stories.

I agree that as a community diversifies beyond a single group a referendum will give a more generic answer.

It works well so long as you are like the group. I think subreddits are a good way of focusing on a topic.