Partial wishlist --

Trivial extensions to Scoopish systems that either don't exist or do and should be far more visible (or defaults):

1. An option to display one's own comments in order of most recent reply, rather than of most recent posting. As it is, to notice new replies to more-or-less recent comments, one must remember how many replies each comment had when you last viewed it. This is just nuts. Note that this would allow discussions on old diaries to continue almost as well as on new ones, greatly lessening the rolling-off-to-oblivion problem.

2. An option to view diaries in order of most recent  comment, rather than of most recent posting. See above remark on rolling-off-to-oblivion: this would make renewed conversations visible to others.

3. A mechanism for sending within-blog, screen-name-based email to other participants. This would allow channels for communication of messages that shouldn't be on public threads, whether because they would be distracting, or embarrassing to the recipient, or contain private information.

4. Multiple categories for new and recommended diaries, so that (for example) philosophy, political strategy, news, and humour aren't competing for the same space.

5. Etc.

More deeply different models of community, not necessarily improvements or replacements for what we have here. The objective is to make a system that gets better when more people participate (like Wikipedia) rather than degrading. Some characteristics (not as close to specifications as the above):

1. Ratings don't define the relationship of the ratee to a community with given boundaries; they define the relationship of the ratee to the rater. Ratings help determine how visible the ratees postings are to the rater.

2. Rating a participant highly makes that person's ratings combine with one's own, with some weight. That is, you tend to see what others that you approve of want to see.

3. If party A has a pattern of ratings like that of party B, the effect is much like that of giving a high rating to party B. Amazon may have a better approach to achieving the desired effect here.

The intended net effect of the above mechanisms is to make communities more self-organising and less hard-edged. Negative ratings make someone tend to disappear from one's attention, but don't eject them from a group in any hard-edged way. These ratings would be private, and would have the voting-with-your feet property of changing your (virtual) location and interactions.

I have various related ideas, but these should give a sense of what I have in mind. Much of it is beyond the scope of Scoop-like systems.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

After seeing the astounding success of Wikipedia, which I would have predicted wouldn't work, I'm not at all sure what is needed. Here are some characteristics of what I imagine, though --

1. A natural way for controversial topics to be found: this is easy, controversies usually have one or more well-known names. It is may be important to allow different names without privileging any one of them, but showing clearly that they're regarded as addressing the same topic.

2. A natural way for advocacy groups to coalesce and sort themselves out. Some mutual-rating system along the lines that I sketch in my other reply might provide a good basis for this, given some additional mechanism on top. A metaphor for this is the Google PageRank algorithm, in which pages "recommend" one another, and recommended pages have higher weight in giving recommendations. Some of the other features of the Google algorithms may also be relevant.

3. A Wikipedia-style mechanism for advocacy groups to present their side of an issue.

4. An interface that forces disputes into structures that enable side-by-side comparisons. The degenerate form of this would place each side's extensive presentation of facts and arguments, point by point, opposite the other side's equivalent of repetitions of "neener, neener, neener!". The point-counterpoint structure would typically be far more informative than this.

In light of the miracle of Wikipedia, it may be that (1) and (2) are superfluous, or could be quite rudimentary.

An effective system of this sort would probably have a social value on the order of a trillion dollars or a billion lives, but good luck getting anyone with social concerns to consider whether this is true, or to treat progress in this direction as a high priority. Instead, we see vast intellectual effort addressing the effects of specific instances of unresolved or wrongly resolved controversies, or into refining and elaborating complaints about said effects.

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.