Heya, nice response. I had thought of a couple of those things, but didn't want to make my post into war and peace!
1. I'd expect all posts to have a default value of 'low', on the assumption that if a user can't be bothered to make the extra mouse click so that people really notice what they say, it can't be all that important.
2. All of these sites already give you the option to unfollow or ignore individuals who post only crap you don't want to read - if a person really has a different idea of importance you can stop reading them entirely, or add them to a different priority list, just as one might now. Even better, I love the idea that softfruit suggested below about a multiplier, so you might be more interested when your primary partner has a great sandwich than when the schoolfriend you haven't seen in ten years gets married, and can reflect that in your filtering system. That would rock!
Apps-wise, I get that developers may want to give apps a slightly higher priority because they make money through this, so they could always default to a slightly higher priority than standard posts (as long as nobody takes away the 'ignore' option!)
Other users rating importance level could potentially work too, I think. I have seen several news sites in particular use a rating system for comments that relies on user response - where positively rated comments rise to the top, and negatively rated comments are dropped down the page or filtered out - and it works fine. It's statistically based, I believe, so that comments that get an 80% positive response have the same ranking whether that's from 10 people, or 1000. It might still devolve into lolcats having the highest rankings though, so I still lean towards posts being ranked (or not ranked and left at default low importance) by the original poster.
Other sites use the 'karma' system, for example, where individual posters are ranked on the quality of their posts, but in terms of what I'm wanting to achieve I don't think it's quite as useful.
no subject
1. I'd expect all posts to have a default value of 'low', on the assumption that if a user can't be bothered to make the extra mouse click so that people really notice what they say, it can't be all that important.
2. All of these sites already give you the option to unfollow or ignore individuals who post only crap you don't want to read - if a person really has a different idea of importance you can stop reading them entirely, or add them to a different priority list, just as one might now. Even better, I love the idea that
Apps-wise, I get that developers may want to give apps a slightly higher priority because they make money through this, so they could always default to a slightly higher priority than standard posts (as long as nobody takes away the 'ignore' option!)
Other users rating importance level could potentially work too, I think. I have seen several news sites in particular use a rating system for comments that relies on user response - where positively rated comments rise to the top, and negatively rated comments are dropped down the page or filtered out - and it works fine. It's statistically based, I believe, so that comments that get an 80% positive response have the same ranking whether that's from 10 people, or 1000. It might still devolve into lolcats having the highest rankings though, so I still lean towards posts being ranked (or not ranked and left at default low importance) by the original poster.
Other sites use the 'karma' system, for example, where individual posters are ranked on the quality of their posts, but in terms of what I'm wanting to achieve I don't think it's quite as useful.