There is no way for the community to effectively exert influence on the behavior of new members. That is the problem.
A complicated algorithm or formula will not fix this.
New members have the ability to upvote. If there are enough of them with interests and standards contrary to the current culture of HN, they will upvote each other and bootstrap their own culture. Eventually they and the people they subsequently attract to HN will overwhelm the original culture.
This problem will not be fixed unless there is a threshold system for upvoting or PG and the Y Combinator mods take a more aggressive approach in removing articles.