[unescape]

Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.

[oh_sigh]

User-local moderation will be hamstrung by the lack of data. Sure, you can block certain users or reorder the results a little bit, but anything interesting would probably require the server shipping over huge amounts of data to a client which may never even do anything useful with it, which sites are unlikely to do.

Your best bet if you really want this feature is to implement it yourself server-side with just enough knobs to make it useful for your user-local case, and hope that other sites agree...

[unescape]

Individuals publishing psuedonymous moderation would provide the necessary data, provided privacy concerns can be addressed.

I.e. as I upvote your comment, I publish the info that "user XYZ upvoted this comment" which you can use in your own user-local moderation schema (at your discretion).

What we have to avoid is when Potential Employer looks for info on "John Q. Smith", they can identify which articles he upvoted.