I created this proxy to help with this, it dynamically creates certs from a self-signed-trusted local CA. It only targets OSX for now. It's not perfect but it has been working great for me.
People can vote sites both up and down, so assuming a decent number of people are participating you can can a general idea of what people think about a certain domain. In the case of something like ComputerWorld where some people don't care about the ad style, and some people do, it could have both up votes and down votes, each neutralizing the effect of the other so it wouldn't get as bad of a "rank" as sites where more people agree that they don't like it. Also, there is no import or export features so its still very much up to a user to checkout the domain and decide to block it or not, it's not making any decisions for you.
I'm a little surprised at the number of "no remote" in this thread. I've done some great work remotely, and with the right tools I think a team can "gel" and really work well together. Any comments?
I would bet that the system a sliding scale, not a hot or not situation. More than likely users are being shown matches that the system deems to have similar "attractiveness" levels, based on that click-through metric mentioned in the email. The email we see in this article would then just be a notification letting the user know that he or she has cross into the top 50% of click throughs. As their click through has been increasing slowly over the length of their membership they would have been seeing more and more other "attractive" people as their rank increased.