In general, Paul, is there a reason not to open up a machine-readable HN platform for people to tinker on top of (other than the time it'll take to code)?
Exposing voting history strikes me as an obviously bad thing to do given that votes have always been anonymous. Even if you tried to scrub personal information from the data, it'd be fairly easy to match anonymous ID's to HN nicks.
Full voting history, probably, yes. Number of votes (some relation to activity, perhaps) not so much.
Anything that's obviously going to make it easy to reverse engineer anonymous things isn't a good idea, but that doesn't mean you can't still find interesting gems.
I agree. Aggregate stats such as whether a small group does most of the voting, whether the same people seem to vote for the highest ranked items, etc. would be pretty interesting while not giving away too much information.
I am also curious whether a completely open system would work. Has that ever been tried? On a system the size of Reddit or Digg it would be intriguing to see how groups cluster.
