More on topic, I'd like to see more options to customize the "editorial policy" of your site - how many votes to get promoted, how user karma works, how sites get blocked, manual overrides, and so on.
I find when I compare HN and Digg, I'm struck by how the sites have come to reflect the personalities of the people who founded them. Here it's hyper-technical and it makes you think twice about commenting frivolously, because of the potential for what seems like infinite downvoting and its effect on karma. Digg is pretty frivolous and all over the place, perhaps because karma is not visible to users, and downvoting doesn't have the same direct effect on karma.
My point being that the personalities behind the site shape the content - even if the engine is "democratic", the constant tweaking of that engine represents an editorial policy, just as much as a newspaper's.