People can't read everything, and have rely on others to filter up the good stuff. If you read something random, based on no recommendation, it's charity work (the odds are extremely good that it is bad) and you should recommend that thing to other people if it turns out to be useful. Ultimately, that's the entire point of any of this design: if we don't care about any of the metadata on the papers, they could just be numbered text files at an ftp site.

The fewer things I have to read to find out they're shit, the longer life I have.

I say the opposite: put a lot of thought into how papers are organized and categorized, how comments on papers are organized and categorized, the means through which papers can be suggested to users who may be interested in them, and the methods by which users can inject their opinions and comment into those processes. Figure out how to thwart ways this process can be gamed.

Treat the content equally, don't force the content to be equal. Hacker News shouldn't just be the unfiltered new page.

Most articles are not interesting, most of the interesting ones are interesting only for a niche of a few researchers. The front page will be flowed by uninteresting stuff.