Slashdot's commenting system is one of the best I've seen. One thing I wish they had though is the ability to filter out types of comments. You can already label comment as "funny","interesting", or whatever, but you can't filter by those labels. I want to be able to read at a threshold of 3+ and not funny.
Re:Design: Voting up or Down is Dead
by testapplication on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @12:26AM
(#68401)
Are you crazy? You can just set a -1 funny modifier (I set -2, Slashdot's meme humor rampant and unbearable). If you do that, and browse sorted by highest score, Slashdot has by far the best comments anywhere on the net, aside from certain niche newsgroups.
Slashdot has a good system, but for increased granuarity users actually need to think more about what they're voting, instead of what is possibly a subconscious, wholistic, instantaneous judgment, which seems pretty applicable for Digg. So there's a tradeoff for a system to be "easy to use" rather than "intelligent."
In this sense the UI becomes a bigger challenge than the data processing. See http://x-o-o.com/news.php?sort=new It's a dictionary-supported rating system with granular voting, in the sense that you can vote 10 or 0.1 if you choose to do so; it also supports weighted voting.
It is much harder to use than digg though so such a system probably will not reach popularity. But I think theory wise it is the best implementation.