There are some interesting ideas here. see above
Particularly a chronological comment system with upvotes/downvotes being present but not re-ordering. And the bump order/votes hybrid where comment activity as well as upvotes play into the ranking. I don't know about character length as a qualification because the wordiest writing isn't necessarily the best (better to get to the point with as few words as possible) and because it would have to be adjusted perfectly so that text posts and link posts were ranked on relatively even terms.
I've read it over. I'm not sure how I feel about that I'll have to think it over. However I do think that at least for the moment its important to create a culture here on poal that encourages people not to use the downvote button as an I disagree button. Its for spam, it needs to stay that way for poal to be successful in its current form.
(post is archived)