I wish you were right, because it would be a lot less work. But herd dynamics alone don't produce anything like HN's front page. HN is actively curated and always has been. The site is a set of feedback loops between the elements of its system: community, software, and moderation.
If upvotes alone were deciding everything, the front page would consist of the few hottest topics repeated over and over, plus the indignation and sensation du jour. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The reason why unregulated hivemind behavior composes to a dumb and unstable outcome is not that the people contributing are dumb. It's that they're only using a small part of their attention. If everyone here would deeply reflect before upvoting, flagging, posting, etc., about whether that action making the site more interesting in the long run, we'd get different results. But people don't put that level of attention into what they're doing here, nor should they—it's a lot of work, and everyone has more important things to worry about. What that means, though, is that the hivemind is mostly acting reflexively rather than reflectively (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is bad for a site like this.
The solution is to have a small number of users (i.e. the mods) specialize in worrying about that, i.e. putting full attention into the site as a whole, and reflecting on it and regulating it (or helping it self-regulate) at that level. Then you get complex feedback loops between the big system (the community: large population, sporadic attention) and the little system (the moderators: tiny population, focused attention), which makes the site more unpredictable and interesting. Edit: software is also a critical part of this.
To have paid staff manually micro-regulating like this isn't what I call a solution. You're simply prodding the herd with a stick, and your message is virtually drowning amongst the other ones.
You cannot be imperative, top-down to a community and expect that to work.
"For discussion purposes, moving from Beta to RC doesn't make a new topic" <-- kinda trying to convince
"For the purposes of HN threads, there's no difference" <-- almost resorting to authority
That tone and kind of discourse is ... unfortunate.
It's similar to the Wikipedia principle, don't say something is amazing, explain WHY it's amazing. Then you will perhaps convince 10s or 100s of people that will not enforce your rules but perhaps convince other members of the same. I just hope your rule is right :)
In other words, a community cannot be sustained by being regulated by privileged people, poking them here and there. A community needs to regulate itself and their individuals need to grow themselves.
By the way, such a (humble) message would be worthy of being colored in a distinct way to give it more priority.
But given the abysmal lack of development (and also the current state of features, ew) on the HN site, I doubt that such a feature would ever emerge. In fact, the only thing that makes HN worth visiting is its users. The website itself is horrific.