The general problem of voting systems is that they're based on popularity. Not truth, significance, value, enduring wisdom, true artistic creativity[1], or any number of other factors.

Truth is not a popularity contest. It is the antithesis of choice, as truth is what persists despite your preferences.

Presuming you even start with a founding cohort that does value the items I've just ticked off, the with time and growth, or even just simple attrition and replacement, you'll see regression toward the mean. And, for those who are seeking a higher grade of discussion ... they'll eventually boil off -- brain-drain induced less by reward-side than cost, fleeing the noise, aggrevation, and sheer bullshit of a typical mass platform.

This means that small sites that do happen to kick off with a particularly good founding cohort simply cannot count on that carrying them through. As much as I enjoy Mastodon, for example, the "this is such a wonderful community" comments make me cringe inside, because I know so well just how dependable that dynamic is: nil. Facebook was once literally Harvard. Now it's wrestling with whether or not it must abide by hate-and-lie-mongering asshats.

The problem is hardly new or specific to online media. Dwight MacDonald was among many who wrote of the degradation of mass culture in 1950s and earlier. There's former FCC chair Newton Minnow's "vast wasteland" epithet from 1961,[3] or Edward R. Murrow's "Lights and Wires in a Box" (1958).[4]

H.L Mencken wrote exquisitely about the underlying dynamic, and specifically what drives it, in "Bayard v. Lonheart" (1925)[5] -- concerning politics, but through the mechanism of communications, discourse, and intelligence. And traces the concept to the ancient Greeks and Aristophanes' "The Frogs".

It's when we turn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's insight on stupidity that we realise the problem is fundamentally existential:

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.[6]

Hanah Arendt also writes of the consequence of tolerating media misuse:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed.[7]

I'm going beyond directly answering your proposal to address several other comments asking in essense "what's the big deal", or shrugging off the problem as beyond redress. All three assertions -- your unfortunately naive moderation/reputation notion, and the other two -- are false, and in potentially explosive ways.

These are not conclusions I come to gladly, nor are they views I believed, or would even have been able to clearly express a few years ago. But as I look at both the present and the lessons and counsel of the path, they're the truth I'm forced to admit.

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Notes:

1. Whatever that is....

2. https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_and_the_Public_Inte...

4. https://youtube.com/watch?v=RHaV59RB8A8

5. http://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lion...

6. https://religiousgrounds.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/bonhoeffer...

7. http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hannah-arendt-explains-ho...