[grep2]

What would be required to grab your attention? Curated content? A better discussion platform? Or just plain more signal per noise?

One approach I'd like to see implemented is some monte carlo comment display algorithm. Assign every user a base point level (based on his contributions/selectable?), show every comment/post with score above this level, but comments below with decreasing probability.

This has the advantage of allowing new/initially low-ranked stuff to get picked up faster than a hard threshold, while keeping the noise at a level acceptable for the user.

Or is this nonsense?

[davidkatz]

Sounds like a good direction, like most things it probably needs to be tested in the wild. I'm not sure that it addresses the heart of the problem though, which might be this: as communities get larger, quality drops.

This is a hard problem to solve, and all I can do is offer some ideas. One idea might be to have a hierarchy of influence, where some users have more power than others, and users get promoted automatically according to their activity.

Off the top of my head, here's one possible way this could work:

Say you have three member tiers - reader, contributor and editor, and let's further say that the power of each tier differs in order of magnitude. readers can grant items 1 point, contributors 10 points, and administrators 100 points.

If members at a higher tier than you consistently upvote stuff after you upvote it, at some point you get promoted. In the same way, if they downvote stuff after you upvote it you get demoted.

I'd be interested if HN or Reddit ever experimented with something like this.

One other important thought - you'll probably never be able to completely automate a great community. Or put another way - everything else being equal, a community that is also actively curated by someone with great taste is probably going to be better.