When things grow, they change, often becoming worse from their “old” users point of view. So, why would you want it to grow, as opposed to staying the way you like it?
More like with Usenet where every user would have their own scorefile, which determined the order they would see posts. Except without having every user to manage it for themselves, instead choosing which "frontend" to use.
>The best I can think of is not to let people see the penalizing behavior
I wonder if it would be possible to split HN (or any other HN-like site) into two halves: one would handle the actual storage of posts and comments, and another would handle the scoring, ie the order the comment tree branches appear in. Then we could have multiple of the latter, competing with each other on the scoring alone, with the actual content being common.