out of curiosity, could you use re-tweet count's to determine interest(although i'm not sure how much screenshotsaturday images are RT'd.
Good question. You could.. I just don't know how big of a percentage of images are retweeted. Though it could be enough to automatically have them enter into the matchup system. I guess after 1500 or so matchups that I've done I'm tired of seeing mostly black screens with a few simple sprites rendered onto them. When you see screenies that show stuff like this I find it pretty cool: http://www.gamedev.net/page/showdown/view.html/_/runevisioncom-r397
I was wondering if a histogram of the image could be used to determine much.. Looking at the bottom screenshots I do notice that there is a tendency to have very unsaturated colors, possibly use a very limited color palette, and contain relatively few image features of note.
http://www.gamedev.net/page/showdown/view.html/_/edg3za-r314
This isn't an exact science since this is purely aesthetics... I just need to be able to come up with some metric that quickly finds if an image is unlikely to suck. Maybe I can at least filter out some low hanging fruit.
On another path I have retweets of the image, the potential Klout score of the poster, the poster's number of followers, the ranks of all the author's previously submitted screenshots..