I read HN quite a lot, and I have to say, I rarely get around to reading the New page. Honestly, it takes me a lot of time to just go through most of the stuff that hits the front page (including comments), so I usually don't have the time to check out more articles whose quality hasn't even been vetted.

I think HN really should implement a way around this. The most obvious is to randomly show new articles on the front page, give them a chance to collect some points (if they're good, of course).