Nah, this has way more to do with karma points than with "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

I've seen submissions by original authors not trending, but then someone with enough karma points booming the same article in a second submission, and then folks having to adjust or point to the original submission to give the proper credit (and karma points) to the author.

Visiting [newest] always has a handful of entries that are genuinely interesting, but never trend. At all.

I challenge HN team to bring one to three random entries from [newest] into the [news] (trending) page as an exercise.