Scoop is warping my reality tunnel. I see a film and think, this got on a recommended list somewhere. Anything I see or read, I look around for a [rate] or a [recommend] button. Anything interesting conversation I have, I filter in the back of my mind, “would kossacks or (boomen, tribuners, what DO we call ourselves?) be interested in this and, if so, keep notes!”
And this is even though the rating system infuriates me just as the one on My Yahoo does, which is arguably even worse: “Would you recommend this story?’ ‘from 1 to 5’. It may be a horrifically badly written piece of spectacular garbage about a story that badly needs to be more widely discussed, so you rate it up.
Even with Scoop where you have the separate abilities to [rate all] and [recommend] you still can’t properly express your feelings with one drop-down menu click.
I submit for your consideration the drop down grid, perhaps color coded. A simple sixteen square x/y grid, x standing for agree strongly at +2 to disagree strongly at -2 and y standing for fabulous and interesting at +2 to uninteresting garbage at -2.
Anything in the lower left is essentially a troll. Anybody regularly below (-1, -1) should probably be banned. The lower right quadrant might be newbies and rush-jobs. Most of the highly discussed diaries will naturally be in (1,1)-plus territory though I hope we also have and discuss diaries in the high upper left.