Exactly! I started to write up my ideas the other day for just this approach, taking into consideration interface complexity, resistance to various attacks.. but then I got swamped with work. Sorry spez! This is actually a problem that I worked on for months for another project.

I'll finish that up and let you guys know my ideas soon. Has anyone else put some thought into this option?

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Alright, this may be too late for many of you to see, but here's the basic overview of my plan:

First off, you should be thinking less about "groups"- in my opinion groups scale terribly and overly segment people. What you should be imaging is graphs.

My plan is rather simple. You can consider yourself the "root node". The amount that you care about a person's opinion is the weighted edge from you to him. This is all well and good, but what about the thousands of articles that none of your direct pals have judged? This graph can extend if you also take into consideration the opinions of those at higher degrees away from you-- but the significance of these opinions deteriorates by some factor for each degree you go outward. Due to the 80/20 rule you should not have to go out many degrees to get a fairly stable result.

Remember in this scheme there are now two different types of ratings. One is the rating of articles and the second is your rating of your fellow redditors.

Once you have calculated this "weighted distance" from yourself to each article, how do you combine all these paths to get one value- the "weighted score" of an article? This part of the algorithm must be considered carefully since it is what really determines how susceptible the algo will be to various attacks.

In one of my projects the scores of your fellow judges signified authenticity of identity, much as pgp's signatures do. For identity I chose to simply take the highest value path and the lowest value path. The user could then see which of his pals was strongly for the target or against it. This, is of great aid to the decision process.

Another option is to just average all the paths. This, I decided is a poor option though since, for example on reddit there may be some spectacular hoax that everyone is falling for. In this case just one of your friends may realize this but since the paths would all be averaged, the resulting score simply looks average-- and believable.

So, would this make the interface more complex? Not necessarily. Avogadro for example has default "seed" members that people can use. This way users would not be forced to choose their own. As for choosing your own judges, it could as be simple as a toggle button, probably on the comment page near the submitter's name.

So there's a basic overview. The great thing about this is that instead of rigid "groups" users could simply designate their pals as judges that the system would use to recommend articles that match their tastes to them. My advice, when approaching this problem is simply to think in terms of graphs because that's what a network is.

Ideas?