In my opinion, yes. Whenever the site got mentioned somewhere, a new stream of unimportant topics appeared.
Why can't or shouldn't the gravity be dependent on submitter reputation? Wouldn't we find any techniques to prevent gaming such a system? If the raw importance, not gaining another karma points, matters, shouldn't we consider moderation by selected hackers?
Sorry for asking so many questions, but I find these being very fundamental to any further considerations about limiting anything. If you want to do this, you have to have some authority.
I strongly support the idea of opening the HN database. This would let the others build interfaces around it, experiment, and hopefully find better approaches to limiting the noise.
As a summary, please note that in case of increasing the quality, one has to do any of the following: - increase the signal, - limit the noise, - develop better techniques for dealing with poor SNRs (but I find this being unapplicable by humans).
To make things clear, my comment is solely about limiting the noise. I'd be very happy to hear ideas on actually increasing the signal.