Not yet, but an experience/performance weighting is something we're very much keen to implement. You should see any replies to your forum posts in the newsfeed, and any interaction with your Straws/valuations will appear as a notification. Mentions such as you describe are a good idea, though. We'll add it to our future enhancements list!

Hi Sharecrow -- yeah, basically you want to just support content you feel offers value (by voting up) and visa versa. In terms of valuations, it helps us determine the average intrinsic value for the community -- the more positive votes, the bigger the weighting. The more negative votes, the less the influence that valuation has on the average. In terms of Straws, votes help us rank them on the Straws page. We want users to see the most endorsed content first. We may have direct messaging in the future, but at the moment we're working on a few other priorities. (You can post a message in the associated company forum as an alternative for the time being). Cheers