You could (relatively) easily, implement Pagerank but use votes instead of links. This would make people who have lots of (quality) upvotes have more weight. W

You could (relatively) easily, implement Pagerank but use votes instead of links. This would make people who have lots of (quality) upvotes have more weight. Whether it would improve the quality of the comment sections is an interesting question. I'd be interested to see that tested somewhere ...