This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. You're essentially going to have to rely on your users to categorize things, which they probably won't do.
One person's academic article is another person's lolcat picture.
This was exemplified to me recently on http://newslily.com/; We had a new user who was constantly submitting things that he thought were appropriate for "science" or "medicine", but they weren't (at least not in the opinion of most of the users). To him, this was hard science; good stuff, but it was mostly things that we weren't interested in. How would the slider work for him?
The solution (one that is similar to what digg did [although we've had this for about a year, humph]) was effectively user-whitelisting. Now, what you see on the front page of the site is things that our moderators have approved, and what you see in the various categories (or "upcoming" section) is things from users that you have whitelisted.
A major misunderstanding (and why I think that user-whitelisting is better than what reddit or HN do [and is also why I think a control like what you're talking about wouldn't workd]) is that people are not all the same; this is why I like the idea behind what digg did (hey, it's worked for facebook and twitter, right?)
One person's academic article is another person's lolcat picture.
This was exemplified to me recently on http://newslily.com/; We had a new user who was constantly submitting things that he thought were appropriate for "science" or "medicine", but they weren't (at least not in the opinion of most of the users). To him, this was hard science; good stuff, but it was mostly things that we weren't interested in. How would the slider work for him?
The solution (one that is similar to what digg did [although we've had this for about a year, humph]) was effectively user-whitelisting. Now, what you see on the front page of the site is things that our moderators have approved, and what you see in the various categories (or "upcoming" section) is things from users that you have whitelisted.
A major misunderstanding (and why I think that user-whitelisting is better than what reddit or HN do [and is also why I think a control like what you're talking about wouldn't workd]) is that people are not all the same; this is why I like the idea behind what digg did (hey, it's worked for facebook and twitter, right?)