There should be one more data point in there, and it's the hard part, because it makes the dataset nonlinear:
6. The same data for parent and children of the comment
Every comment's rating is heavily swayed by its position within the thread. A comment replying to something at the bottom won't get voted on. A comment replying to something at the top, with just as much merit, will almost always get somewhere between 0.5x to 1.0x as many votes as its parent. A child comment somewhere within a low-voted comment's descendants saying "why am I getting downvoted?" has the potential to call off the latch-on-downvoting effect, and thus give the comment a chance to spike upward. A comment in reply to something no one bothered reading will be ignored despite its merits. Etc.
Of course, your "content worth rating" is orthogonal to all of those concerns, and would probably help in changing the patterns mentioned above, which are mostly bad for the comment futures market. :)
Comments
There should be one more data point in there, and it's the hard part, because it makes the dataset nonlinear:
6. The same data for parent and children of the comment
Every comment's rating is heavily swayed by its position within the thread. A comment replying to something at the bottom won't get voted on. A comment replying to something at the top, with just as much merit, will almost always get somewhere between 0.5x to 1.0x as many votes as its parent. A child comment somewhere within a low-voted comment's descendants saying "why am I getting downvoted?" has the potential to call off the latch-on-downvoting effect, and thus give the comment a chance to spike upward. A comment in reply to something no one bothered reading will be ignored despite its merits. Etc.
Of course, your "content worth rating" is orthogonal to all of those concerns, and would probably help in changing the patterns mentioned above, which are mostly bad for the comment futures market. :)