Ask HN: Noise in HN, an idea to throttle it down

It has been pointed out several times that new items submitted to HN have increasingly less chance of being picked up because of how fast the new items page scrolls items out of sight. This problem will be growing as HN gets more users.

Maybe the approach of showing the list of new items in the "new" page is not necessarily the best one [anymore]?

An alternative approach would be to display a random subset of new articles from the past n minutes on each display of the new items page. This is particularly true for times when several articles are submitted per minute, which will only become increasingly common.

That way each submission would get more time (from a smaller audience) to be picked up and more quality items would be upvoted.