carl
I sense a lot of... fear of the future/unknown/internet-populus floating around this conversation, and I think it's driving a lot of assumptions.
I agree that there are a lot of branding and bias management issues surrounding this concept. My opinion is that with some creativity and a well honed perspective, a lot of the perceived blockers can be used as advantages. If they are no longer treated as blockers, then progress can be made, rather than wait-and-seeing the feature to completion.
For Example: I don't assume that the terminus of this feature will not support multiple pools of site rankings that a user can create their own consortium from. A user may be able to select from a menu of sentiment pools, or be matched to a pool(s). I have no idea what this would look like, but i have several ideas surrounding the concept.
I loathe to mention it, but just think about reddit within this collaborative social search context. They have many many maaaaany self selected groups based around the core concept of up/down votes.
I will admit that I hand-wave away the activist element, and it may be bigger than I realize. My assumption is that features of this nature should be architected in such a way that is tamper-resistant. Given the kind-of non-single-kagi-user-pool thoughts I've been chewing on lately, I also suspect that a majority subset these 'activists' are just maybe the angry-pitchfork-rabble sentiment group. Ok .. welcome - knock yourselves out. here's how you socialize about where to throw pitchforks... so to speak. (or perhaps more accurately, here's what pitchfork-wielders up/down doot most đ )
As far as timing goes... I also have a different opinion. One could also say that the small tight knit nature of the current user pool lends itself to 'simple iterative' feature delivery at a time when growing-pains might be less impactful. Perhaps this feature will have refined to the point that it's ready to support the diversity of the internet, before said diversity shows up at the front gate. The small nature of the user group might be an advantage from this perspective.
