Except that particular measure was designed to discourage casual visitors from being interested in HN, for the sake of reducing the load on the server. And it was a joke at that.

I know it was a joke, my point is that encouraging "Wow!" is good, discouraging "What's this?" is... well... unfortunate.

To me, "Wow!" is an extreme form of "Interesting!" And by "interesting," I don't mean the same thing as "Capturing attention." The HN front page is full of stuff that captures attention, however "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee Vivek Kundra" isn't interesting in the same sense that Boltzmann’s Universe (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/01/14/...) is interesting. The salient difference is that although the former is entertaining, it doesn't change me in any way. It isn't actionable.

Whereas the latter leaves me wondering, and I will still be thinking about its implications tomorrow.

So overall I would say that de-emphasizing attention-capturing stories is great, provided they are replaced by interesting stories. And when the traffic subsides, by stories that are interesting and attention-capturing.