Ah, but only if the honeypots are chosen to match the explicit and stated guidelines -- which are currently often ignored. Should that drift, the tone of the site will change slowly, invisibly and inexorably, and the old guard will be automatically shifted out with a silent coup de grace.

The honeypots become a way for moderators to upvote or downvote the whole tone of HN and do so without telling any of the users.

I look forward to the bot- and crowd-based tools that will evolve to watch the front page of the site and try to guess which articles increase or decrease your HN influence. It's a mathematically interesting problem.