Any 'solution' to the 'quality problem' that fails to acknowledge that some people are obviously voting up the (politics|techcrunch|zed|etc.) articles you perceive as low quality is going to fail.
You need to account that some people love the hyperbole that you always find in (politics|techcrunch|zed|etc.) articles, and some people don't. This suggests implementing 'cliques'. If you upvote a submission, you grow one vote closer to the clique of people who also upvoted that submission. People whose vote history match yours very well will very easily influence your front page, and the articles of a kind you rarely upvote will be less likely to cloud your front page.
(More feasibly, you could just add some 'coolfinders' manually, whose upvoted articles automatically jump to your page.)
Categories just invite meta posts of the 'not <category>' type. Articles that fall into multiple categories are another problem, and tags don't quite solve that one either. They also inorganically split the community and add an extra step to the voting or submission process.
Comments
Any 'solution' to the 'quality problem' that fails to acknowledge that some people are obviously voting up the (politics|techcrunch|zed|etc.) articles you perceive as low quality is going to fail.
You need to account that some people love the hyperbole that you always find in (politics|techcrunch|zed|etc.) articles, and some people don't. This suggests implementing 'cliques'. If you upvote a submission, you grow one vote closer to the clique of people who also upvoted that submission. People whose vote history match yours very well will very easily influence your front page, and the articles of a kind you rarely upvote will be less likely to cloud your front page.
(More feasibly, you could just add some 'coolfinders' manually, whose upvoted articles automatically jump to your page.)
I've sent you some mail about this. Very interesting indeed!
I haven't had time to look it over in full yet, but I will respond when I can.
thanks!
How about having different categories?
Categories just invite meta posts of the 'not <category>' type. Articles that fall into multiple categories are another problem, and tags don't quite solve that one either. They also inorganically split the community and add an extra step to the voting or submission process.