I've been thinking on it for too long myself. For the record: I recognize that I'm often shouting at you for things you do with your website on your time with your money for your entertainment, and that's a dick move. Sorry for that. And for the record, I do it because I've invested a lot of my time in the exact same place and I have nothing to show for it - and whenever something changes without my input, I'm reminded of that fact.

Allow me to appeal to you as a scientist:

One of the arguments I've made against Team Reddit is that they betatested once. Go check my user page - I got a badge out of it. It worked. They learned a lot. And then they never did it again.

I don't know nearly enough about coding to even phrase the conversation in a useful way, but allow me to fumble around for a little:

you need a beta interface.

You need some code to sit on top of your code that allows users to tweak their own personal functionality. You need a EULA that says "here's what I'm tracking, here's what I'm not, here's why, and by strapping this thing on, you consent to let me watch how you use it."

You need to be able to fuck with it regularly. You need to give me the option to turn it on and turn it off and see what it does to functionality. You need to say "we're rolling out this beta feature we've been messing with and we're rolling it out site-wide for a week or until we decide it was a horrible idea, whichever comes first." You do have god-like powers around here - might as well tweak things to see what happens. Perform some versioning, take some notes, run some experiments, see what you get out of it. Shit, write it up well enough and get someone to sign off on it and call it a legit experiment. Maybe get some grant money, who knows?

You really do have a unique opportunity here in that you have a small, tight-knit community that doesn't torch'n'pitchfork much. You don't have a massive userbase to rabblerouse. You're a lot more agile than any other aggregator and you have the wherewithal to flight test.

No matter what you roll out, you're going to get a global answer. Put the stuff you're thinking about messing with into several peoples' hands before you do it, and you can get a better handle on what you get out of it. Surveymonkey is your friend.