I wonder what percentage of HN readers are like me and just skim through the RSS feed every day. The top of the front page and the worthless submission make it into my Google Reader, and I read what I find interesting. Which is great, but at the same time I don't participate in upvoting articles. I would guess the more passive users would be more interested in the hiring thread rather than extremely trendy topics like bitcoin. But that's the tradeoff. I mostly consume rather than contribute, and therefore just take what I get.