Interesting to see this brought up... as a pretty much straight writer/blogger (as opposed to developer) this site is curious to me as there is some good content created here, but there's a remarkable lack of "outside eyeballs" looking at it and sharing it. Call me old fashioned, but it seems sad that the moment a new metric is brought up, there's a horde ready to "game it" artificially rather than simply allow it to be an authentic measure of something.

How can this place hope to create community-- and hence any kind of "lasting value"-- absent real human eyeballs to interact with the content? Unless, of course, the social network function is just window dressing rather than the backbone of the system...