> For me the objective of "most up votes" is not fully correlated with where I get the most value on HN. Most of the time, the most up voted I would have found them anyway on other platforms.

Yes, this is a fantastic point. I'm curious if there's some other measurable proxy metric for "things I get the most value out of on HN"? Upvotes seems like the most natural but optimizing for it too strongly would definitely take HN down a dark path.