I think the useful low hanging fruit would be to allow you to select a section of a post with your cursor and up/down vote that section.
What would that actually do? (This most definitely is not low hanging fruit.)
I think an implementation is easier than you might expect (but I’ll try to do more to prove it). I haven’t looked at the code on the site yet, but here’s my guess: when you click up, for example, javascript is triggered to send an AJAX message to the server with the particulars (who clicked?, on what?). If the event handling code is changed so that it queries for the current selection if any, and adds that information to the message it sends the server, and if the server logs that additional information in its database, then the biggest part is already implemented.
To make this useful the information needs to come back out somehow, and making a nice shiny implementation of that involves more work, I admit. A bare bones implementation would be an additional icon on a comment (next to permalink, say). Click the icon and it gives you details about comments on the post. E.g. it dumps the time ordered (anonymous?) list of up’s and down’s together with anything that was selected at the time.
Edit: maybe you just meant “can you tell me how that would function as a social dynamic?” Sorry if so; let me know. see also my rant
I think an implementation is easier than you might expect (but I’ll try to do more to prove it). I haven’t looked at the code on the site yet, but here’s my guess: when you click up, for example, javascript is triggered to send an AJAX message to the server with the particulars (who clicked?, on what?). If the event handling code is changed so that it queries for the current selection if any, and adds that information to the message it sends the server, and if the server logs that additional information in its database, then the biggest part is already implemented.
To make this useful the information needs to come back out somehow, and making a nice shiny implementation of that involves more work, I admit. A bare bones implementation would be an additional icon on a comment (next to permalink, say). Click the icon and it gives you details about comments on the post. E.g. it dumps the time ordered (anonymous?) list of up’s and down’s together with anything that was selected at the time.
Edit: maybe you just meant “can you tell me how that would function as a social dynamic?” Sorry if so; let me know. see also my rant