That's super cool. I worked on Smyte and have wanted to replace the language with something very similar to what you're describing. I'd love to learn more about it.
I almost alway use Que [1] now. It uses postgres advisory locks instead of Redis so one less dependency to worry about. You probably only need Redis if you're running a tonne of jobs.
It can be tough to stay motivated while working alone. If you're happy to share the success with other people you could build it with the help of the assembly.com community.
OP here. We built this on Assembly. The code is open and we'd love if people got involved to help building it. Check it out on https://github.com/asm-products/readraptor
Great points, here's some of our thinking around this:
1) The voting is not a judgement of people's contributions, it's more the community's valuation of a particular piece of work. The votes help prioritise the importance of a task or feature which can then be claimed by anyone who completes the work.
2) It's a tricky thing, what is the idea worth? 1%, 2%, 10%? 5% felt about right to us but we'll definitely be reviewing this over time.
3) We're going to actively keep WIPs small where we can to help avoid this problem. We also have a core team that helps guide the community towards a shared vision. They can promote certain tasks so they attract more upvotes which in turn makes them more enticing for people to complete.
Thanks for the feedback, we're expecting to do a lot of iterating and working with the community to keep evolving the process.