I agree upvotes suck, but I think part of the problem is both displaying the score, and allowing downvotes to influence things. I'd like more builtin randomnes

I agree upvotes suck, but I think part of the problem is both displaying the score, and allowing downvotes to influence things. I'd like more builtin randomness for things. Display comments but display them randomly instead of by any sort of score maybe. But then this all belies the biggest issue I have with reddit/hn/whatever. Trying to follow discussions is painful as its hard to ascertain what has been posted since you last read things and not. That alone is my biggest gripe with most of this, even newsgroup readers made things much easier to follow discussion. But I'm curious, how would the netflix style algorithms work in practice? It would seem like it would just encourage more filterbubbleish input not? Occasionally off topic news tends to be somewhat engaging and I don't like the idea of removing serendipity amongst news/programming articles. I may not use haskell for example often or even at all, but lots of the time I do see articles that really end up being well worth my time to read.