>>jseip+(OP)
As other folks have mentioned there is a raw feed if you want to see a non-penalized version.
It would be interesting if it somehow incorporated other elements to determine article "value":
- Open rate
- Ratio of comments to opens
- Time spent on article or comments
- Depth of comments
>>franst+Xu
Sentiment analysis is becoming pretty accurate so maybe you could take into account the number of negativew/positive comments as well. Maybe that will eventually replace voting systems, who knows?