Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.
Your best bet if you really want this feature is to implement it yourself server-side with just enough knobs to make it useful for your user-local case, and hope that other sites agree...
I.e. as I upvote your comment, I publish the info that "user XYZ upvoted this comment" which you can use in your own user-local moderation schema (at your discretion).
What we have to avoid is when Potential Employer looks for info on "John Q. Smith", they can identify which articles he upvoted.