[sillysaurus3]

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Not really what you describe, but it's along the lines of "give me an alternative to the frontpage or /new." I don't know precisely how it works. I think it gives more weight to votes from older accounts, but that's just a guess. It does seem to be a slightly higher quality frontpage, but that might just be confirmation bias. After all, if it were truly better, then /classic would be the actual frontpage.

There's also http://hckrnews.com/ which shows a time-ordered list of all submissions that reach the frontpage each day. I prefer it to HN's frontpage, both because you can scroll back over the past few days and because there aren't that many submissions that reach the front page each day, so it's easy to quickly scroll through a list of all of them to pick out anything of interest.

[3rd3]

My thought was that the comment rate factor would allow for old stories to be bumped back to the top. Highlighting new comments would allow to continue old threads. I clarified my comment above in that regard.