As if the horse isn't already dead enough
Consider the effects of regulated voting (i.e. removing the voting links after a user's vote for a period of time, e.g. 1 hour for submissions and 5 minutes for comments) and regulated posting (removing the add comment box if the user has commented or voted recently, e.g. in the past 5 minutes) on the pernicious scourges of News.YC: rampant upmodding would become much less rampant, popular lowest-common-denominator banality would subside since banal hilarity is only funny for a moment, newcomer acclimation would improve as newcomers are directed to the discussion of the article, karma gaming would remain unimportant as karma does not confer any additional benefits, and comment deluge would slightly decline as long-winded retort threads would become more difficult. Additionally, it might even prevent the worst cases of News.YC addiction.
The motivations for the above suggestion are twofold: firstly, that it takes time to read articles and comments thoroughly and little time to vote unintelligently or add a troll comment, and secondly, that scarcity of available voting and commenting power causes users to deliberately consider which sites are worth waiting to save and which comments are worth waiting to submit.
A more general solution would allow exponential rating, where a rating of five would be a multiple greater in importance than a rating of four, but the step function of delayed voting and commenting is an approximation. The idea is that intelligent users have very carefully reasoned tastes (c.f. pg and his essays), which act as a long-tail filter a la Chris Anderson. For them, most everything is dross, whereas there are a few gems in the rough that are orders of magnitude (i.e. exponentially) better. Popular lowest-common-denominator banality is popular precisely because of a lack of carefully reasoned tastes, and in aggregating opinions of the best news, News.YC could bias towards the intermittent but intelligent content by regulating votes and comments to only slightly discourage that content while greatly encumbering the introduction of banal content.
So, what say you?