Post in Participation Inequality

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 17:58 -0500, Steven Clift wrote:
> 3. A "recommend" or four/five star rating option next to posts would be a
>  nice option even if it is primarily done via the web  and  a recommed click
> through in the e-mail footer. (I wonder if we could automatically Digg and
> Redit posts recommended from out site?

Recommending I think is a good idea. I'm not yet convinced on the star
rating (despite being a fan of the idea earlier) -- my reasoning is
this:

It works well at, eg. Netflix or Amazon. This is because you get visits
to the same subject (a video, or book) over, and over again, with
millions of users.

The same is *not* true for a post, typically. The occasional post might
hit the big time news, but typically it is seen for a day or two, and
fades from popularity.

Google implements star ratings on posts. I have only *very* occasionally
seen them used -- and they have millions of users.

I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad idea, but I think perhaps it would
best be integrated as part of the 'quality contributors' idea that you
discuss. A simple thumbs up/thumbs down, which contributes to the user's
overall 'karma' would be one way of doing this, I think. Then highlight
entries in the topic/post according to their 'quality'.
    

--Richard