Power users, ranking users or in any way giving precedence to users with a history of popularity has been the death knell for a number of online communities. It's consistently a poor way of identifying users who make positive contributions to the site, and it's a consistently good way to alienate new and occasional users.
I suspect there's two reasons for this. The first is that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. Take a look at Reddit's front page today, and you'll have a hard time picking out anything worth reading from the memes and jokes. Popularity normally reflects the lowest common denominator. Rewarding users for being popular inevitably leads to users rewarded for pandering to popular opinion, rather than for making insightful or meaningful contributions.
The second is that engagement level rarely is indicative of comment quality. The internet is a vast place with a huge number of users, and as a number of studies (particularly on Wikipedia [1]) have shown, a users commitment to the project or website doesn't correlate with contribution quality. Essentially, contributions from a new or rarely commenting user are just as likely to be worthy as those from long standing members.
I've been actively commenting and engaging forums, social news sites and other online communities which allow commenting on topics since 2002, and time and time again I've seen sites grow in popularity and decrease in quality. My personal desire in a site is one with a fairly active membership which both introduces interesting topics and news stories and provides interesting commentary on them. I enjoy engaging in discussion about a wide range of things, and I do my best to find websites that allow and encourage that. I think perhaps the most interesting thing I've observed is that communities with a fairly high barrier for entry - perhaps a payment of some sort - and aggressive moderation policies manage to maintain a consistently good level of discussion over much longer periods of time.
I suspect there's two reasons for this. The first is that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality. Take a look at Reddit's front page today, and you'll have a hard time picking out anything worth reading from the memes and jokes. Popularity normally reflects the lowest common denominator. Rewarding users for being popular inevitably leads to users rewarded for pandering to popular opinion, rather than for making insightful or meaningful contributions.
The second is that engagement level rarely is indicative of comment quality. The internet is a vast place with a huge number of users, and as a number of studies (particularly on Wikipedia [1]) have shown, a users commitment to the project or website doesn't correlate with contribution quality. Essentially, contributions from a new or rarely commenting user are just as likely to be worthy as those from long standing members.
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/10/anonymous-good-sa...
I've been actively commenting and engaging forums, social news sites and other online communities which allow commenting on topics since 2002, and time and time again I've seen sites grow in popularity and decrease in quality. My personal desire in a site is one with a fairly active membership which both introduces interesting topics and news stories and provides interesting commentary on them. I enjoy engaging in discussion about a wide range of things, and I do my best to find websites that allow and encourage that. I think perhaps the most interesting thing I've observed is that communities with a fairly high barrier for entry - perhaps a payment of some sort - and aggressive moderation policies manage to maintain a consistently good level of discussion over much longer periods of time.