Also, given enough use, this system would output some interesting information about who the highly-thought-of commenters are. (It's like an upvote, but I think data that reflects actual usage of a system is more honest than data that users say reflects their opinion. Think del.icio.us vs. yahoo directory.)
People should link to their analogous lists of favorites in the comments here. That would be cool. Aggregating them into statistics is where it becomes gameable, but just having those links raw creates an ad hoc and transparent trust network.
Are you able to keep up with the volume on YC? I find I'm missing a lot over just the time I sleep.
If you're not going to be able to catch it all then it's much better to try out different filtering approaches (this is just a prototype) than to leave the filtering to chance. So went my reasoning.
1. I'm not suggesting people only use this interface. I myself do not. But it helps me make sure that I have greater coverage over at least the known sources of interesting stuff, with the rest getting the same random sampling as before.
2. This is just a prototype. There are other ways to filter stuff and I'm exploring those as well.
3. If and when Hacker News suffers a huge influx of new users, this tool will help me sift through them on my own schedule without causing me to lose my old 'friends' in the meantime.
Pretty gameable, too.