Yip! See those little triangles by this comment?
Go look at something such as a phpbb site where topic ordering is driven solely by 'bumps' - the most recent topic to have a comment gets bumped to the top of the page listing. You'll find they rarely have any worse ordering of content than voting systems provide. In my opinion it tends to be simply superior. It also avoids the huge problem in point based systems of requiring some 'parallel universe' /new stream that only a tiny and biased minority ever view.
But voting systems drive "engagement." One intuitively surprising discovery is that downvoting users tends to drive them to comment more, frequently with lower quality posts following. I say 'intuitively surprising' because it seems counter intuitive, yet if you've spent any time on point driven message boards, including here, you see the constant stream of little tit-for-tats as a downvoted user (or two) engage in an ever lower quality of 'debate' in some isolated thread. As for upvotes it goes without saying that that little micro-shot of dopamine is what's built, and arguably sustaining, the social platforms of today.
To its credit, HN actually has systems in place to deliberately discourage tit-for-tat commenting. First, it deliberately has no inbox to notify you of replies to your own comments, so you're much more likely to neglect to discover that someone has replied to your comment. Secondly, it disables the inline "reply" button for comments whose age is below a certain threshold, so that only power users who understand the workaround can actually reply to young comments. Thirdly, it has no support for navigating deep comments into dedicated subthreads like Reddit has, so instead successive comments will become narrower and narrower until eventually becoming literally unreadable (not actually sure if this one is deliberate, it could also be laziness, but the effect is the same).
As for bump-ordering, I lost most of my youth to phpbb-like forums, and I'd say they foster a mindset of even more obsessive interaction because not only do non-nested threads become impossible to follow if you're away for long enough, but keeping your preferred topics on the front page requires frequent monitoring and carefully-timed comments.
> Thirdly, it has no support for navigating deep comments into dedicated subthreads like Reddit has
You mean like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129671 which directly links to the 'parent' of your comment and is formatted almost exactly like a 'Ask HN' post?
In my experience on forums posting bumps is frowned upon. The ordering is then based on activity and presumably interest.
Bump driven systems suffer from the problem that half the posts are simply people posting the word "bump" in order to drive the parent post higher up on the list.