Indeed, it might be worth a try. The impression I got from when Slashdot were introducing, refining and talking about their system was that there are subtleties in making it create the community / discussion environment that you want.

In particular, most people browse with filtering on and the highest ratings first, to cut out the noise, but that means people tend to give +1 ratings to posts which already have high ratings, creating a sort of bandwagon effect, and additional insightful posts to a thread tend to get missed if they aren't early on.

Slashdot recommends (or at least they used to - I haven't been there for ages) that people browse with filtering off from time to time for that reason - to make sure that good posts are found and picked up. I don't know if people bother, though.

I've no objection to trying things out and seeing how it goes.