i would rather see flagged articles get removed from /newest quicker, and have some mechanism for letting articles with at least 1 other upvote, or maybe those submitted by users with enough karma, to linger on /newest longer than they would otherwise.
It makes finding the goodies tougher, and it makes especially link-baity things more likely to hit the front page (because they stand out, and can get the 2-3 votes needed before they drop below the fold to actually stand a chance of being seen by anybody).
Not to whine, but there was an article that I wrote recently that I thought a lot of people here would enjoy. It was something that most hackers that I showed it to, loved, so I figured the people here would too.
The people that saw it, did. They tweeted about it, liked it on facebook etc, but it never saw the front page, meaning it never got very many eyeballs on it.
Now...I can see this because when I write the article, I can watch the traffic. I see the same trends (without being able to look behind the scenes and see how much traffic is actually being sent) on anything else I submit.
Look at stuff like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3109235
This is the type of thing that got me originally addicted to this place. Maybe I'm just getting smarter, but lately the articles here seem a lot less hacker-oriented. It's a lot more business-gossip.
Hence the implicit honeypot extension that I proposed. :)
even with zero spam, the site is now big enough that legitimate articles can get submitted at a rate that makes the /newest page move too fast for things to get traction.