I think the only way to really make this work is to have a crowdsourced safeguard system that doesn’t rely on individuals.

Personally I think tagging is the only thing that can work, because it is a multi axis upvote downvote system that simultaneously creates metadata that isn’t tied to user identity.

The reason it DOESN’T work on Steam reviews is that bad actors are not punished for ‘joke’ tags, and a persistent reputation system per user would fix that.

When content gets a lot of views and engagement, the outlier engagement is easily identified, i.e. ‘joke’ tags, and a temporary decrement on that users’s ‘community power’ can be enacted making each of the tags they use count for less than an average user.

The opposite is true, people who frequently tag useful tags early can be identified, and given more community power, where their tags are worth temporarily slightly more than the average user.

To keep ‘community royalty’ from forming, the extra community power for good tags decreases to normal over time, meaning that only through consistent and frequent community engagement can ‘super users’ maintain their power, meaing if they start to abuse it the backlash will decrement their community power back to a normal user quickly.

With the explosion of forum manipulation and AI chatbots we NEED a better way, and the only way we are going to get there is trying new things.

Well,. here’s a new thing to try.