Sounds like a design issue. Why does the front page have an upvote button if we expect people to read the post/article first?

Interesting point. Perhaps if you click through the upvote button shouldn’t appear until 5 minutes later?

Because some people check the linked article only and might never look at the comments.

There isn't a website on the planet that allows for votes where it doesn't very often happen that they provide a viewport into the boundless stupidity of the human species.

I wonder how H.N. and similar websites would work if ranking was purely a function of activity and not of votes — simply push to the top whichever branch of the tree has the last reply so highly debated news is statistically more often at the top, but whichever link had the last reply somewhere will be currently at the top.