[evgen]

There is actually a lot of research in this specific area out there, so don't worry about needing to give the idea away :)

Some systems I have noodled around with apply a similar set of vectors using an advogato-like trust metric, but one where each viewer is their own source of (advocato was a hierarchical system where trust flowed from a few sources, given available resources today you can evaluate the flow network from each viewer's individual perspective.) It is not too hard to extend such a system to embody ideas like "expertise" where topics and keywords are passive nodes in the graph so that Alice can upvote Bob for postings related to coding but downvote him on postings about politics.

The research and mechanics are fun to play with and think about, but when you start to analyze the system in terms of the sort of community it would probably create you end up with a collection of smaller, partially overlapping echo chambers. The real problem, IMHO, is that you need to get a little bit more signal on the inputs. Up/down is just not enough. I think a system like this can determine if you using up/down as agree/disagree or as interesting/stupid, but if you mix those signals things appear to rapidly head towards some unpleasant local minima. If there was a nice way to get users to use a four or eight point voting box (permute agree/disagree, interesting/not-interesting, and optionally add a null signal for each pair) then you could really do some fun stuff for creating a neat alternative to all of the various social news sites out there...

[ChuckMcM]

Interesting, the term 'advocato' doesn't yield much in the terms of research along these routes, do you have a paper reference? (Lori Avocato does have a few papers that pop up on scholar.google.com though, I bet she got kidded a lot in grade school)

So perhaps the ideal karmic feedback device for this system is a compass rose with a center button. This would be

                <agree>
                   |
  <not this> - <perfect> - <more this>
                   |
               <disagree>

The idea being that you could choose 'perfect' (which would exclude all other choices) or you could choose one of agree/disagree and one of not this/more this.

The idea of course is that there is an inferred 'commonality' point and by dropping these comments and stories you can have people give an indication of where they sit relative to those inferred points.

And while it certainly might lead to a bunch of 'echo chambers' my experience in such systems is that it pulls people out of those echo chambers into bigger clumps than that.

[evgen]

Damn autocorrect; you catch one letter and miss the correction on the other one -- two paras in I still had not noticed that my response appeared to be discussing avocados.. "advogato" is the system I was referencing, and if you want to dig into similar work check out papers by Cai-Nicolas Ziegler, some of Pattie Maes old work, and Hugo Liu's work from before he joined Hunch.