A preview of HyperKitty's reimagined mailing list interface

But when asking, say, a technical question, there may be a number of wrong answers, a number of right ones that simply explain it badly, a number of unrelated answers, a number of rude ones, and a number of correct ones that happen to be well-written and generally more useful than all the others. Those are the ones you might want to have bubble up among all the others.

And the same for other types of discussions; there may be knee-jerk reactions, ad-hominems, offtopics, etc. In any busy discussion group, it helps if it is easy to see which ones are generally thought of as better-written/throught-out than the others.

Of course you don't want to hide them or move them to some bin where you never look, but +/- on comment definitely has its uses.

For the people who are part of the project for which the mailing list exists.

"Average"? I don't think that applies. A more interesting question is: Do we have a useful notion of the _collective_ taste of the contributors to a project? This is specifically a way to get a sense of that.

> Moreover, if it's really that interesting, there must be replies.

This.... seems like a comment from someone who doesn't use mailing lists very much. It's true that most interesting comments will get replies, but the problem is that so will very many others.