yes i've been saying this...
you can count replies as a value in the formula, for example...
you can rank the amount of content in the replies as a value in the formula...
you can categorise negative and positive terms in association with nouns and pronouns to establish some sort of a metric, this one is a bit more fuzzy and would need an AI to recognise the patterns better
ah yes and you can also catch themes as well, from infrequent keywords that will give some measure of the ways in which you trust, ie, this person is a good philosopher, this person is a great coach and pep talker, this person is comic relief, etc etc etc
i think there's a lot you can do before you have to bring ML/AI into the scheme as well, and that is good because it means you can keep that processing on the client and not move it out to the network, and it means that privileged data can contribute (eg DMs)