This is deviously awful, yet highly effective. It makes for a desperate underclass of the automatically ignored, yet never lets them know that they are members of said class
But this is not serfdom. You have mobility in the case of implicit honeypots, because if you follow the guidelines well then you'll float to the top and become a super flagger. And even better, if you stop consistently upvoting crap, then you will rise from the ignored to the heard again. :)
Ah, but only if the honeypots are chosen to match the explicit and stated guidelines -- which are currently often ignored. Should that drift, the tone of the site will change slowly, invisibly and inexorably, and the old guard will be automatically shifted out with a silent coup de grace.
The honeypots become a way for moderators to upvote or downvote the whole tone of HN and do so without telling any of the users.
I look forward to the bot- and crowd-based tools that will evolve to watch the front page of the site and try to guess which articles increase or decrease your HN influence. It's a mathematically interesting problem.
Better yet, it accuses them of deserving it.
Ten Machiavelli points to you, sir.