There are a lot of people not worth attending to. If you do spend your time listening to these folks you don’t hear new ideas you hear the same bad ones over and over. It would be lovely that having noticed that someone is a persistent holocaust denier he could be added to a list that would disappear not only their contributions but their votes as well for thousands of users.
Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?
Not only is it not hard to imagine its easy to imagine the benefits of using this information automatically. I could imagine a client side script which re-ordered content based on who I trusted who had up or down voted it.
So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
Not only can I potentially re-score threads and comments based on whom I trust I can if I really trust someone’s opinion apply their weights as well, and the weights of the folks upstream.
Why would we not? Why would we listen to a damn thing they have to say?