A site I used to work for had a pre-moderation system for pictures posted on the site that worked like this, to the best of my memory: There was a moderation queue and various volunteers (here it could be the >1000 karma people, I guess) went through it and gave their vote. A picture had to reach all positive 3 to go live or positive six to go live if there were any negative votes. Moderators were awarded points based on how many of their votes matched the consensus. This encouraged them to keep doing it, even though it's kind of boring. Here that could be karma bonuses.
If you really want to make sure that every post gets voted on you may need to do something like that to incentivize endorsements.
> Moderators were awarded points based on how many of their votes matched the consensus.
That's cool because I can imagine for a picture site you want all pictures to gravitate around the consensus, a strong self-selecting group-think can be very desirable.
But for HN ... well at least the people who end up sticking around will surely love it ...
To be clear, this was content moderation and not some kind of hot or not thing. They were basically there to prevent porn or pictures of dismembered penises from going up.
There were a handful of people who had multiple points per vote who could swing it drastically away from the 'consensus' if it was wrong, and doing so also penalized the people who voted for it.
If you really want to make sure that every post gets voted on you may need to do something like that to incentivize endorsements.