I've been kicking around a few thoughts over the past few decades.

There's a fundamental limit to the number of distinct messages a person can assimilate in a day. I've noticed from several reports of personal email patterns (Wolfram and others), that about 300/day is a typical upper bound. That's 1.6 minutes per email (or an email every 1.6 minutes) in an 8 hour day, though it's not atypical to see patterns where someone dedicates a few hours of the day to managing emails.

I ran across a truly staggering statistic of the rise in the number of communications a manager received per year from 1970 to 2015. On the order of ~400 (per year) to 30,000. I suspect some possible undercounting (phone and direct in-person messages, as well as, say, message slips may have been omitted from the earlier tally), but that's a change from ~2 messages per day to about 120. The time and consideration given each has to fall.

I've spent quite some time pondering collaborative filtering systems. Typically, these strive to rate and rank, and sort by significance individual messages. On a typical Web or online service, all visitors will see all messages, eventually. This can produce problems when, say, a top-ranked subreddit has several thousand comments in it -- it's unreasonable to expect anyone to read them all, but also somewhat unfair to those who contribute later to be fated to not be seen at all.

The HN front page and new submissions pages suffer a somewhat similar problem.

One model might be to target a given page or platform for a set number of visible submissions at any one time, but using the content filtering system to adjust not the position on a page, but the probability that any given user would see the content.

An alternative might be to divide content into several categories, a logarithmic progression of quality. I'm fond of Likert scales, usually 5-9 levels. Here, the idea is that each level is an order of magnitude "better" (I'll explain the quotes) than the previous, with increasing likelihood to be seen. All content should be seen by someone. Better content is seen by more people. With a five level scale, L-1 content is seen by 1:10,000 visitors, L-2 by 1:1,000, L-3 by 1:100, L-2 by 1:10, and L-1 by 1:1. It might well be possible to work with smaller numbers of categories.

Another advantage is that this system would tend to reduce the filtering overhead as content was more highly rated, such that more trusted / discriminating raters could be explicitly called in to assess the small number of highly-ranked posts. The slush pile, as it were, is fanned out among many, the good content filters toward the top, where it's multi-checked for quality (I'm assuming here that the objective is quality and not just "attracts eyeballs"), including being flaggable for various negative characteristics (misleading, spam, social norms violations, low-effort posts, etc.).

There's also the challenge that explicit content rating tends to be problematic -- there are a few too many incentives to game any rating system, and much behavioral indication of quality or interest which isn't explicit.

In the cranks'n'geniuses model, you'd divvy up your recipient pool such that incoming submissions get farmed out and no one evaluator has to see too many of them, but all submissions have at least a reasonable likelihood of being reviewed. Better submissions go up the set (perhaps subject to specific tests, e.g., can someone find an example which contradicts the claim). And expert's time wastage is minimised.

And whether or not the submitters think they themselves are Jesus and/or the others dead beings manipulated by experimenters largely doesn't matter.