alt Hacker NewsReputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site.
If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.
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reputable ugly bags of mostly water society
>secret societies like the Oddfellows do
yes and they're all full of suckers. In the best case which is already bad you get a pretentious online night club like Clubhouse, in the worst case you get Epstein's island.
These walled off societies always attract people who are drawn to exclusivity, are run like dystopian island communities or high school cliques and tend to, in a William Gibon 'anti-marketing', way be paradoxically even more vapid.
No you need actual open access and reputation systems. A good blueprint is something like well functioning academic communities. It's a combination of eliminating commercial motives, strict rules, high importance on reputation and correctness, peer review, and arguably also real identities and faces.
The open-invite system works well in many cases. It works particularly well in-person but even there you can get drift over time. Our fraternity unanimously agreed on every single initiate who joined; the cohort today is still very different from the one 20 years ago.
In online systems the scales quickly get too big for open-invite. There needs to be a way to automatically update the trust network at a fine grain.
The one that jumps to mind is an inference system; when I +/- a comment, I'm really noting that I trust or distrust the author. It can be general or on a specific topic (eg I trust the author to tell the truth or I trust the author to make me laugh). I could also infer that other people with similar trust patterns are likely trustworthy. And I could likely infer that people who are trusted by people I trust are trustworthy.