This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time.
The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no system that can replace that yet.
Hence the constant stream of articles confirming tropes that play to the HN demographics.
It's basically impossible to have a reliable 10+% conversion rate without targeting the lowest common denominator.