What computer algorithm can be used to code up "...front page position should be determined by quality of conversation not voting"? Are we talking about sentiment analysis?
It's obviously not a complete solution, as it seeks neither to address all quality dimensions nor to replace voting, instead being a factor alongside voting, but still...
http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
"Those other people should die in a fire"
"But you should shoot them too, just in case"
These might be funny, light-hearted, sarcastic, and quality in some topics and angry, mean, toxic in others.
I'm sure it is being worked on but I don't see it happening anytime soon. It seems like it would require to much training and that the biases of the trained data would still produce incorrect outcomes.
Once they learn that "a" makes comments more visible and "b" makes them less, it just becomes an agree / disagree vote
I think you need two things. First an upvote/downvote so that users can express their agree/disagree. This value wouldn't necessarily effect the visibility of the content. Second, a sort of budget system where users can trade earned karma to classify an items "quality".
I think this would lead to a system where you would spend your karma on the communities you care/know/like the most. If I were, for example, a blind apple hater, the upvote/dowmvote makes it easy to downvote apple content or upvotecother content to push it down the page. But I may be more inclined to save my karma for promting Android content instead.