I'd say no. The system has a lot of noise in it, so we're never going to get precise results. At a coarse-grained level, my impression is that it's reasonably well balanced, just messy, and it would be a mistake to try for finer-grained control than that. The way we get the latter is by occasionally manually intervening.

I know it disappoints some of the systematizers here, but IMO there's no substitute for human judgment being in the mix. HN functions best as a complex system with many feedback loops between community, software, and moderation.

(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16182520 and marked it off-topic.)