My previous YC app dealt with this and I posted various comments already, but I still like this topic. An introductory study into conversation theory will tell

My previous YC app dealt with this and I posted various comments already, but I still like this topic. An introductory study into conversation theory will tell you how theoretically bad up/down is. It seems to me that the two-step process is still broken though, because "important" is not a well-defined word. The best system I have seen online, which actually does a decent job of utterance categorization, is Slashdot. Based on the Gricean Maxims and you can come up with some core cirteria for any given utterance, and /. actually covers them surprisingly well. Obviously it's still not a perfect implementation, but they have done a good balance between categorization, ease of categorization, and evaluation of categorization. They really need to grow out of the +5 limit though. While /.'s criterion are good, they don't cover enough ground to become a universal system; it doesn't scale to other cultures. There's a lot more to this I think, but I'm just be rambling again.