What's more, this only accounts for active systems - what about exposing passive systems like the number of times a comment has been viewed, collapsed, expanded or generally interacted with outside of our active ranking system? Some sites do this (Youtube and others) but provide little ability to directly interact with the statistic.
Where does it say we can't combine the best of them and enable some truly emergent behavior?
We need to track multiple vectors of community interest and influence on a comment or thread in order to model behavior and seek to improve signal to noise ratios.
The 'Vectors' can be the combinations of trackable metrics, both passive and active, across a discussion thread and individual comments.
As a simple example: Let's say we combine the various read/expand/collapse metrics into a 'Heat' vector, take Youtube's like/disklike meter and slashdot's SlashMod system of +1/-1.
One of the primary actions that can be taken from this is looking for Tension patterns across the vectors. Tension patterns could be situations where a comment gets lots of negative and positive nudges and is also modded as insightful. Perhaps the system can allow for recognised bias within the community and look for situations where it's being exerted systematically.
Tension generating Threads can then be pushed up the visibility stack to ensure robust discussion.
What if you could apply filters on each of these Vectors on the page as you read it through AJAX controls? Control your own signal to noise preference without loading a different page. Add the ability to remember presets and you can build yourself a set of views to flick through and gain a wide understanding of the discussion.
How would you combine these Vectors to empower the community towards better discussion?
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