That is a very interesting way to use voting to customise your viewpoint. Perhaps click-through to articles or news could also be a factor, those people who cli

That is a very interesting way to use voting to customise your viewpoint. Perhaps click-through to articles or news could also be a factor, those people who click through to the same articles as you tend to have more effect on the pages you see. You'd end up with a graph representation where each user is a node and two nodes are connected if they share a similar voting relationship. Everything that you can vote on keeps a list of the people who upvoted it vs those who downvoted it. Every day the list of voters are cleared (to reduce load), and those people who all voted the same have their relationships to each other strengthened. The submitter of the item you voted on has their relationship with the voter increased by a larger amount still. You then take your relationship to the submitter or commenter into account when comments are ordered for you, perhaps via the shades of grey styling HN has at present.