[BrianAnderson]

Way to issue a challenge that all large communities struggle to solve!

So I have two thoughts that I think are in a different vein than many comments below (tried to read them all but may have missed some. Apologize for repeats)

1. Similar to other suggestions, but with a slight twist, modify the up/down votes to utilize the Net Promoter Score methodology. It has its issues but it reduces a really difficult problem to a simple question that provides a broader spectrum than y/s. Could limit the "would highly recommend" super-vote to one story per day so users would save those votes for those articles they find extremely valuable.

Actually, thinking about it. Would be cool to get a view of only stories that people have "spent" their one super-vote as that is signaling extreme importance. I think many people find many stories interesting, but would only find a few EXTREMELY interesting enough to spend their super-vote on.

2. One challenge is that HN has grown in size so much that there is no set of top stories to satisfy the entire group. Would be interesting to provide a view that matches your personal preferences. Reddit does this by subreddit, stackoverflow by tags. My personal background is personalization in the context of eCommerce, which looks more at user segments. So users who find hard-core tech knowledge interesting vs. VC news vs. geographic location. In some ways this is already being done via segmentation in the classic view: http://news.ycombinator.com/classic Are there some other obvious segments on HN?