I'm going to set up a web community for radio controlled helicopter enthusiasts, and I'm probably going to use Scoop. Existing RC heli message boards suffer from two distinct types of problem users. First, there are trolls and crapflooders just like every other internet community. Second, there are people who mean well, but don't know what they're talking about. The clueless are not unique to the RC heli community of course, but they present a different kind of problem in this context.
First, this is a domain where (unlike political and cultural discussion sites) people come primarily to ask technical questions and gather technical knowledge. Some questions have answers that are actually wrong, not just different opinions. Well-intentioned but wrong answers are just as big a problem as malicious trolling and crapflooding. Well-intentioned wrong answers that seem intuitively correct are even worse.
Second, the community does not want to discourage newbies in the way that it discourages trolls and crapflooders. Modding down and hiding someone's post will hopefully discourage trolling, but with a novice the desired response to bad advice would be to flag or hide the error, but also thank the user for at least trying to be helpful. Unlike trolls, we (the rest of the community) don't want clueless newbies to go away. Generally speaking, a user with a desire to help can and will eventually turn into a valued community member.
So, for the site I'm cooking up, I'd like to see comments accompanied by two rating options, one for accuracy and one for attitude. Accuracy: is the information in the comment actually going to help the person with the question? Attitude: is the comment just a troll, or is it an honest attempt to help?
The accuracy rating would be visible to all users, but adjustable only by users who have reached trusted status in the accuracy dimension. The attitude rating would be visible and editable by all users, perhaps with an extra zero option for users with sufficient attitude mojo.
If either option falls below some threshold, the comment is hidden. This provides a way for the community to deal harshly with bad advice, while still rewarding users for attempting to help.
There may be other situations in which multidimensional mojo would be useful, so the dimension names should probably not be hard coded - an artwork site might want 'aesthetic value' and 'family-friendliness' for example.
The same effects can be had with one-dimensional mojo and replies to explain why a comment was scored lower, but I would prefer to address the problem with numbers, not words. The goal is to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, and such metadiscussion is noise; worse yet, it's a common source of flame wars and pissing matches that degrade the S/N even further.
