Any chance of a ranged version, like "over 5, but under 200"? For some reason, while upvoted stories are mostly good, the most upvoted stories less often interest me, since they seem to be disproportionately about politics, business, self-help/motivation, or some sort of drama. This list is almost a perfect list of stories I'd like to filter out: http://news.ycombinator.com/best (ok, there's some good stuff in there too, but it's not bad as a heuristic).
Someone had a site (I can't remember the details but surely someone will chime in) with custom HN ranking of points divided by number of comments. It was surprisingly effective, though that might have just been the nature of the top stories at the time I checked it. If it did work it would be by also filtering out political and other call-to-action type posts particularly.
I'm with you, I hate the drama posts. I have a kind of half-arsed theory that what I dislike in the evolution of social sites is the inherent community building. I think it tends to get too self-referential.
