That’s a feature, not a problem. The whole point is that every new post gets the same airtime. Of course actual spam/offtopic posting should get moderated away (yes, I know HN seemingly hates moderation and would prefer some algorithm to do it - I disagree), but any form of upvoting/nesting results in “winner takes all”/hivemind behaviour where barely anybody reads past the ‘good’ comments. A forum is like an in-person discussion; upvote-driven places are like an in-person discussion where a couple of people are grandstanding and nobody else gets a word in. That includes HN! There have to be mod posts saying there’s more than one page of comments!

Of course as increasing numbers of passive users joined the internet, upvote-driven sites became more popular. That doesn’t mean they’re better for actually posting on, though.