Comment by scottyah

Nobody has come up with a scalable metric for determining quality that can't be appropriated by SEO. Pagerank was one of the best for awhile (number sites that link to your site, weighted by their rank). Whether it be clicks, time on page, percentage of people who clicked onto the page then ended the session, etc it all gets gamed.

Like it or not, it's what the people want. The "trashy" movies, books, music, etc. all sell like wildfire, why do most people on hn think that the internet should be any different?