IMO there’s a widespread belief that these upvote/downvote systems are fundamentally stupid, which is actually true, but I think it also holds back the implementations a bit.

I’d love to see for example a site that treats them as endorcements or something. The logic could be something like: keep track of the graph of who upvotes what. When you upvote somebody, you reinforce the link between the two of you. Then, when showing posts, rather than just using the raw scores, measure the weight of the edges connecting two users or something like that.

Also have a button that, if you see a post you don’t like, shows you the edges connecting you to it so you can re-evaluate them and cut some.

Or something like that. I’m sure this is open to abuse. But the idea would be that you aren’t just generating like a gamified “high score” for comments, but trying to build a collection of people that you find or are likely to find interesting. It might even help reduce abuse of the voting system, in that people playing “let’s all upvote each other” games will just become an isolated clique, maybe?