One of my ideas about moderation and rating systems is that the act of moderation tells us more about the person doing the moderating than it does about the story/post/person being moderated.
If we think about moderation as relational rather than objective or absolute or aggregating, we can treat the user's moderation activity as their particular web of relations to various other objects (stories/posts/users).
We could then drop all these relationships into an algorithm built to examine large matrices of relationships, say... PageRank. I wrote a tl;dr piece on moderation and online communities here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
If we think about moderation as relational rather than objective or absolute or aggregating, we can treat the user's moderation activity as their particular web of relations to various other objects (stories/posts/users).
We could then drop all these relationships into an algorithm built to examine large matrices of relationships, say... PageRank. I wrote a tl;dr piece on moderation and online communities here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000