Hacker News Reader

Start from the objective of first do no harm. Voting systems may eventually be gamed to distort results, so eliminate the voting system. Instead rely on ad-hoc personal networks to disseminate signal about quality papers out-of-band. Don’t assume you have to systematize everything.

Voting (as was bore out in many examples including digg.com and elsewhere) becomes a mob rule situation and variation of tyranny of the commons without a novelty algorithm in addition to total votes. If you just go by totals, it will be easily gamified and rendered useless as a metric.

The standard and most effective form of curation in science is the reference list at the end of a paper.

But usually you just read everything that is relevant to your research interests from the daily arxiv posting.