I have been repeatedly surprised by how cute and catchy ideas can get lots of buns while other, far more insightful ideas that generate a remarkably lengthy and intelligent discussion, may get only a few votes either way. I guess that’s just human nature to be a bit intimidated in voting for complex issues.

I suggest solving this by giving ideas a bonus for the total number of words written in the annotations (except for perhaps the author’s) and the number of different uses that are involved in the discussion. If you want to be more sophisticated, you could also have penalties for flame/ranting words.

Needless to say, all this will have to be automated in a script. But I expect that the biggest problem would be deciding how to weight all these factors.
-- imho, Mar 02 2009

Vector space again.
-- nineteenthly, Mar 02 2009


quantity != quality
-- hippo, Mar 02 2009


I think also, that it would be very interesting working out how to get something like that to work, since it would have to pick up on humour, wit, irony and sarcasm. I actually think that might be possible, because for example they might turn out to correlate with something like mean sentence length, ratios between parts of speech or some other feature of the language used.
-- nineteenthly, Mar 02 2009


The lengthy and intelligent discussion is itself much more reward than a glib bun or bread.
-- bungston, Mar 02 2009


I agree with bungston. maybe just add a search parameter for most annotated
-- saprolite, Mar 02 2009


This would afford some users (I won't name names) more than they're due.
-- Spacecoyote, Mar 02 2009


Spacecoyote, if you encounter such recipients of unwarranted largesse, take it upon yourself to leaven any long and earnest discussions with ribald anecdotes, poorly metered limericks, enthusiastic and ungrammatical praise, and other such. In the spirit of balance, you know.
-- bungston, Mar 02 2009



random, halfbakery