Looking at a site like Rotten Tomatoes, where the metric is "professional reviewer thought thing was at least decent" and seeing that there is surprisingly little agreement even on such a simple metric (even a terrible movie, like Season Of The Witch, has a 10 so 10% of the reviews like it; even a great movie, like wall-e, only has a 94 - so somebody didn't like it - and most movies are in between with lots of critics liking and lots of critics disliking the exact same thing. Yet we still try to arrive at a truth by considering all their opinions equally as a group. This is obviously doomed to failure.)
It's even more clear when you think about something more abstract, like a favorite color. My favorite color is purple. If yours is yellow, does that mean I'm wrong? Clearly there isn't an obvious objective "This Is Good" when it comes to taste or opinions. Why then is up/down arrows the current state of the art?
I know Netflix has managed to do more by looking for similar reviewers and weighting their opinions, and Pandora does audio classification, but I'm not aware of this concept catching on well in other areas, and I particularly don't know of it being applied to multiple things at once - if I want a recommendation about a new movie that isn't on Netflix yet, or if I'm tired of the repetitiveness of Pandora's stations, their clever algorithms don't help me a bit beyond their limited walls. I don't know of a site like reddit or hacker news or videosift trying to capture more than 'good/bad' for evaluating links on the web. I don't know of a site that is really trying to help me pair my taste with other reviewers, so that I can get personally curated content and we can end up with a world that recognizes some people love action movies and others love romantic comedies and recommending a movie for me to see should take that into account. How wonderful will it be when there is finally a site that can suggest I should read these three articles because -I- will find them good, maybe I should be sure to catch Pacific Rim, and a new band I might like has a video out; while giving completely different recommendations to my sister, without trying to limit to an objective non-relative definition of "good", because we're talking about taste and opinions aren't wrong.
When one of you smart folks makes that site, please let me know.