I have another idea--why not just give people on the leaderboard the ability to "downmod", except it wouldn't affect the points of the submission, just increase the gravity so it drops off the front page quicker.

The idea might work.

I do think that it's a sad state of affairs for Reddit, however, when we're considering Reddit's front page/karma system to be a fluff filter for Hacker News.

How about also changing the title and url of fluff links that have been taken over by intelligent conversation?

For instance, that "programming is like sex" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120816 article had good discussion in the comments and the title should have been changed to "what to do about fluff".

I agree.

Also:

While we may want to white list programming.reddit, there should be a way to keep off the fluff that prevails there. The fluff in programming.reddit are the "too popular" posts. We can flag the ones with too many points / too many comments. They scream "bicycle shed".

It's also in violation of reddit's terms of service.