I volunteered for a project [1] with roughly this philosophy. Traditional publishing currently serves three purposes:

- Organise peer feedback - Publish the work - Recognise good work, helping with both discovery and credit

That latter part especially is what allows publishers to charge the ridiculous markup that they do.

But with "modern" technology, feedback and publishing really doesn't require all that infrastructure - email and arXiv can easily be used to self-organise that. So we built a system of recognition that does not block publication, and can be used as a layer on top of arXiv and any other venue, allowing peers to vouch ("endorse") for a work.

I had even proposed and implemented an integration for arXiv Labs that got accepted, but then never merged. I should follow up on that...

[1] https://plaudit.pub/