There's nothing new in the HN community functioning this way. In fact, it's because the HN community functions this way that the site exists at all; otherwise it would have long ago turned into just another current affairs or celebrity gossip page.
I am increasingly convinced we need to separate content storage from recommendation algorithms.
When an organization does both, it has perverse incentives such as maximizing add-profit or user-engagement by building echo chambers instead of doing what benefits the users - such as maximizing truth-seeking and getting an accurate picture of opinions among the general population.