I like this, it could actually be quite powerful if the data was used in the right way. Can you hook up to social media as a secondary measure to comments and build up that social graph? Especially Twitter.
Also, one thing with the internet is that I bet that 99% of people don't realise just how many relevancy algorithms are running in the background and dictate what you see, what search results you get, what prices you pay and so on. So there may be a small aspect of how many of these articles have been seen by everyone and how many have been filtered by relevancy algorithms?