It seems like there is some desire to see an automatic functionality, perhaps one that you could turn on and off. The difficulty is that although it is not too difficult to discern what commenters you appreciate, it is not as easy to distinguish the ones you are neutral towards, and those that you don't care for. At some point it is helpful to know what commenters you do not appreciate. However, only identifying the ones that you do would still likely be an improvement. I also agree with kleinbl00 on that point. This might reveal other possibilities. doesntgolf makes the point that you might eventually have to rate too many commenters to make this worthwhile. However, it is possible that we could turn this into a functionality that combined the signals of multiple users. For example, if you and I rate a commenters similarly, part of your bias could be used for my sort. Still, I am not sure if that would be a good thing. It does however, create a signal that we don't currently have. I do think that it might be easy to under appreciate the feeling of being able to do something to improve your comment sort. I'm not sure if it would be the case, but I suspect that it might be an alternate outlet for what might have been a negative comment.
And I've been thinking about this and I realize I might be wrong. I keep harping about scalability but lil's discussion here has made me realize that all my favorite communities are small. The idea might not be to make Hubski infinitely scalable so that it never gets that big feeling. The idea might be to say "enough is enough, we have a waiting list for participation." Spitballing at this point, but I'm slowly realizing that if what you have works right now, it might be smarter and simpler to lock it down than to buttress against it not working a year from now.
We've kicked around the idea of a very small subscription fee, something on the order of a dollar per month, with the thought that only the people who really want to be here will pay. I'm against it, however, because I think that we stand to lose rather than gain in that scenario. People really don't like to pay for things, and I think rather than making a small barrier to entry, a fee would just drive everyone away. We also talked about an invite only model, whereby members would earn invites based on participation. That idea is cool, but there's also some problems with it. The thing is, we want to encourage more people to join up, as the whole point is lively discussion, but we really do want the right people. It's a difficult problem.
I know what you are saying. It's funny, just prior to the syncretic influx, we had almost talked ourselves into an invite system. I recall that in the wee hours while driving to launch that snail in a weather balloon, we were talking about the merits of it. I was inspired by lobste.rs invitation tree approach. It would be interesting if rather than just earning badges as your hubwheel turned, you earned invites. I think that ideally, rather than an aggressive front end filter, we have a situation where the right people stick around, and the wrong people don't. I think that we have been fairly successful there, but it's the slow creep that we all worry about.
Designer news has it set up that you can only sign up between noon and 1pm every day. This makes it so the people who really want to join can join without jumping through invite hoops while still keeping out those who want to make a one off comment or spam.
No it's 12-1 EST. It took me like 5 days to remember to do it when I got to work. Kind of annoying but I'm sure it helps.