I'm relatively new here, but if I may offer a suggestion:<p>I don't care much for the points on comments at all. Comments that float to the top regularly defend commonplaces, and while they certainly deserve a positive vote, there's not much to learn from those.<p>But interesting comments, that I gather new insights from, are often written by the same commenters (-&#62;commentators? my English is lacking). Thus, a system that would work well for me, would allow me to rate individuals, so that on the next thread it will show me my favourite commenters first.<p>(edit: wow, suddenly lots of replies in this thread - maybe I forgot to refresh. I believe jefffoster's idea of Bayesian filtering may be more powerful than mine)