This is a great idea. My original thinking was to suggest a combination of enforcing a minimum number of trusted users and then reporting a weighted average of

This is a great idea. My original thinking was to suggest a combination of enforcing a minimum number of trusted users and then reporting a weighted average of your trusted users + the mass' rating but your solution is conceptually nicer since it adds the same noise to the vote but while extending the idea of valuing a particular user's judgement. The big technical issue will be computing these "trusted ratings" for every comment. The trust graph could be done asynchronously so that wouldn't be an issue.