I love the addition of Likes to the posts. In the old days there really was no way to judge the value of a post besides people saying "ya great post". Now you can see which posts are getting the most attention and add the most value to a thread. That leads me to my suggestion though. YouTube has done it the right way with their comment system. With the thousands of comments a video might receive, no one is going to sit and read them all. But the good ones that people "Like" are automatically displayed at the top for new viewers to read. That keeps the good stuff visible for new viewers. Is there any way to do this for threads on DP? It should be where no matter what page of posts you are on in a thread, the top reply is floating near the top. Maybe just an exert of the original reply, maybe a link, etc. That way if a member goes into a thread searching for "the best seo tips" they don't need to look through 60 replies to find the answer. The best stuff is just sitting at the top.
Ya that method would work but for the thread and it's replies. But with that method the member would have to select that sort option. A lot people probably wouldn't know the feature existed. I was thinking like a little info area below the thread title on each page that would say "Top posts in this thread" and could display the author name and a small excerpt of the post that was also a link to the original post. That way the best answer or whatever for that thread is always easy to find.
Yeah... the general idea is something I've been thinking about... how to bubble up good content automatically, and where to display the good content. Likes, views, organic search traffic (obviously we can access our Google Analytics via API, etc.) Haven't started anything yet, but it's definitely been something I've been thinking about at least.