About the "fall off the front page before many readers see them" problem: that's a serious problem, as the discussion is what makes HN such a great place. Maybe reduce the options to "downvote" a news. It should be enough to upvote a news. If a news fall of the frontpage because certain members don't like it, they shouldn't be able to downvote such news in the first place.
Good point. There's clearly at least a little added value in making this info available from HN itself; I wonder how much.
Other ideas we've pondered for surfacing good content: letting users mark posts as favorites and share their lists; or letting people nominate posts as "good but overlooked" and assembling lists of those.
Yup, I use hn.algolia.com for that too plus some advanced search to filter my interest around startups and SV.
Though, if more users of HN could see insightful news, some news would have more comments. And HN is all about comments. I often find out about a news like 8 hours late, and rarely users check back the next day to follow up. (the "threads" link on top definitely helps)
