Yes, the upvote system is broken.

1) Only about 10% of HN readers have an account, thus many people do not have any voting or flagging rights at all.

2) The difference between making the front page or not making the front page is a few votes in a short time frame. A tiny number of people interested in a topic can easily skew that.

3) Not enough people visit new to upvote great content, comment on good and great content, and flag things that don't belong here.

4) Not enough people down vote comments that don't belong here.

Allowing people to filter articles makes HN a nicer place for those people. It's concerning that they may stop flagging articles that really don't belong here. Some of the Snowden articles were just pure political nonsense, with heated pointless threads.

Point 3 struck home. I've changed my textexpander snippet to take me to newest rather than the main page. Though I never get peeved at what is on the main page, I now wonder what I've been missing. Thanks.

Perhaps we need a user script that places the N latest /new submissions at the top of the main news page?

If they're not voting, then they don't really care much about what stories they see.

It's not like creating an account is a laborious process on this site.

I can't downvote anything, despite my account being active for more than a year. I would most definitely downvote a lot of stuff, but HN just won't let me.

Ridiculous.

The heart of your complaint is that you don't agree what people are upvoting is 'good and great content' - either from not registering to vote, or by voting for things you don't like.

That is completely subjective and does not mean the 'system is broken'.

Bitcoin'ers upvote everything mentioning bitcoin because they have a vested interest in people buying bitcoin.

Yeah, that'd be a perfectly reasonable claim. Upvotes (/flags) are a community measure and it's possible for the dynamics of the community, as moderated by the software, to result in the presence a bunch of Bitcoin articles which are only of interest to a subset of the readers, and a recurring annoyance to others. So why not have filters?

Heck, if all were right in the world, we wouldn't have Hacker News as a website per se, you'd have a Hacker News as some sort of "news group" cough on a standardized protocol, and you'd have client software that could filter that sort of thing for you automagically. :P