- the front page would be like reddit's top
- instead of a new page, there's a random page that shows links in completely random order (each refresh shows a new random order)
- vote up if you want to bring a link to the front page
- vote down when you want a link to disappear from the front page (e.g., you don't like it or you like it but don't want to see any more discussion on it)
My reference to site metrics assumed that you'd give out the same amount of mod points to each person, based on some calculation involving the number of articles, users, and how many you wanted on the front page each day.
I can imagine someone being annoyed that they don't have enough mod points to give a single point to each article they find interesting, though, and it would be a pain to have to constantly fine tune the calculation, so one way to mitigate that would be to allow everyone to mod up any article by one point (like on reddit) without using their pool of mod points, and then they could use the mod points for "extra" ups.