There have to be hundreds of thousands of people reading HN. How many never bother to participate in the voting system? Seemingly most...sometimes it would seem that an article appears out of nowhere with hundreds of up votes, and other articles in the "new" section that are clearly good articles on interesting technology related subjects simply wither and die. I think a "viewed" metric for postings might be useful as well, unless somehow the HN algorithm also takes this into account?