Browsing the new posts Searching for information relating to a particular subject In the first case the most important is categorisation by quality/importance of the post.

Aye but who is to categorize these posts as "quality" or "important". Votes may tell us about the quality, but if you are doing sysadmin work with perl do you really want to waste time reading a very clever post about a math problem? My point is both measures are not very well defined for the individual, but more so for the community -- individuals need to be able to fine tune to their interests.

-Waswas