I've heard an economist suggest that instead of tying executive bonuses to the company's own performance, they instead compare it to the performance of other, similar firms.
Still a fuzzy measure, but it would at least give them better incentives.
I've sometimes wondered about a lifetime upvote/downvote counter as an alternative to upvote karma.
This would work in a secure community, but it will stop working as soon as astroturfing PR firms and state troll farms move in, because on most sites it's trivially easy to create downvotes bots to attack specific names.
You see this trend in MMOs as well - towards convenience (and fun) at the expense of community.
Back in the old days of EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI, it was almost impossible to do anything by yourself; you HAD to find other people, and ideally a clan. Enemies would destroy you after level 10 or so, and quests were incredibly laconic and abstruse seemingly by design.
Everything about the game was difficult, dangerous, and mysterious. Reaching out to others was expected, and many were glad to help you through those same challenges they too struggled with.
On the other hand, it took hours - often all night - to accomplish just about anything. Once you got a good party going, you basically didn't want to stop, as just getting to that point took two freakin' hours.
On the other other hand, because everything took forever, you would inevitably shoot the shit, because there was just nothing else to do!
Anyways, nowadays you can easily solo pretty much any modern MMO; and any group content just automatically plops you into a party with some dudes that you will quite certainly never see again. Action is immediate with little time to type anything, (there's surprisingly little support for voice chat in these games), and usually easy enough to hardly require spoken coordination.
WoW ruined community in many ways. They added the Dungeon Finder, so you no longer have to socialize to find a group; they added cross-server battlegrounds, cross-server Dungeon Finder, and even cross-server zones, so all your experiences are with random people you'll never see again; they made it trivial to travel from place to place, so you don't need to go on epic journeys that require banding together for survival. There used to be a role for "community elders"—experienced players who would show newbies the ropes, organize and lead dungeons and raids, etc. Those things still happen, but because they're no longer necessary, it's possible to get all the way to endgame raiding without making any friends (or even speaking to anyone). Since you don't need any community to play, toxic players can succeed—and even thrive—by being selfish and taking advantage of others. There's no social credit anymore.
Politics is intensely personal. It's not so much about conflicting ideas, but rather loudly delineating social groups and whose camp you're in.
Pushing beliefs to simplistic extremes and demanding declarations of beliefs is an efficient way to make clear where yourself and others stand socially. Truth has little to do with it.
Politics seems "stupid" because we're putting the cart before the horse.
I think what's different now is how many strangers you're exposed to. A century ago, analogues to context-less twitter rage pile-ons were likely smaller and rarer.
