With the majority of articles about cutting edge science, very few HN readers would be qualified to state whether or not it's a breakthrough or bullshit. The option would protect HN from the bullshit, but it'd also hide the breakthroughs that people believed too good to be true. I think that'd be an overall drop in the quality of what we read here.
You're not wrong, but maybe on HN at least many of those people can be counted on not to vote out of reflex, unless they do really bring something to the table.
The other simple, sad fact is that the big breakthroughs that have some initial traction issues stick around. Often people point to the very early history of SR/GR, but it's worth pointing out how that turned out. When a shocking breakthrough is actually a shocking breakthrough, it ends up producing results that speak for themselves.
Until then, when it comes to extreme claims, so many more are just "bullshit" than "breakthrough". Our lives are finite, so it's not wise to ignore the role of triage in those lives.
Don't care, Dislike, Disbelieve, Downvote, Doesn't belong on HN. It just feels like a spectrum. Maybe we could rate each thread on a scale of 1-30, ranking where we think it should be on the page?
Or maybe pick from a number of descriptors just like the ones you listed, and if one breaches a certain threshhold, it gets tagged with "Widely Disbelieved" or the like.
