But that would mean that stories with only one point never get seen, and hence never get up-voted, and hence nothing gets to the 2-point page. It seems necessary that people should read "newest" and up-vote things they think are of value.

I agree. I usually read the (unfiltered) newest page, but sometime this is useful to find a story that was submitted 12 hours ago and only got 2 points. Perhaps the problem is that there are 928 stories submitted in the last 24 hours.

There is much to read, especially things that only get one up-vote, or even none at all. I simply click through the "More" link on the "newest" page gestalting the titles - there's nothing I can think of that would substantially improve on that.

Of course, that might simply be my lack of imagination.

I use HN Search to find interesting stories I might have missed in the last 24 hours. Often these 1 or 2 point stories are very interesting and merely got lost in the stream.

How does anything get on that list then if nobody ever sees the 1-point submission (without asking for votes).

exactly. that's the true terror of pagerank -- not that spammers are putting in millions of junk links, but that it makes legitimate people stop linking.

A link gets a point every time it is submitted. So it's quite possible for a link to get more than 1 point without the link ever being seen.

Text submissions would be stuck at 1 point, though.

When I read the newest page I usually ignore the points. Most of the stories are 1-point or 2-point anyway. What I scan for is the comments. If the story is on newest and already has a few comments it's often worth reading in my experience.