This would solve the issues reported about late night news being ignored because no one is around.
Anyway, great article.
This can fail in a lot of ways, most obviously if Javascript or cookies are turned off. Also, the cookie isn't sent to Reddit until I load another page, so if I read an entire page of links and then close the browser without refreshing the page, the cookie doesn't get sent. Plus, the script clips the list around 20 elements, so even if I did refresh Reddit, it wouldn't know I'd clicked on more than 20.
My point is not the numerous weaknesses of Reddit's approach. Instead, it's self-reported information that must necessarily be suspect and incomplete. If an article on an obscure programming language pops up here, and every single person who reads it uses Lynx with cookies turned off for security, there might be no opportunity to record any views.
See: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html
Also...I'm pretty sure that his argument for the "Dampening The Weighted Votes By Record Age" section is wrong. If you assume that each vote has the same weight (like HN, Digg, etc.), then you can rearrange the terms so that it's possible to use an algorithm that updates the 'rating' of the story on-the-fly.
Where do you get the data for this? Its something I'd like to toy around with a bit but I have no idea how to get data.
