As the other guy mentioned, devolving into 4chan, tumblr and reddit are what happens when there is no individual cost--disincentive, not necessarily financial--to polluting the public information pool. The first layer of defense is a scarce publishing profile, the second is scarce publishing frequency and third is individual accountability.
There are very few scenarios where a person can be physically threatened by the nature of their information. In those rare situations, anonymity doesn't protect the individual because the information is likely only privilege to a small group.
To identify content of public importance, you would need to identify which people the information is important to geographically and then determine the demand via market forces and then determine the trustworthiness of the content by evaluating the individual sharing the information.
You end up with a trust structure tied to publishing capability on a geospatial information system.
I saw a suggestion on Reddit where with each million users, the headlines get even more distorted, that there be a karma penalty for distorting the headline. I think that could work if it was on a per subreddit basis.
Reddit can manage the volume if they get rid of the legacy media content. I don't see that happening with Conde Nast running the show though. Subreddits aren't as diluted by corporate content as /politics or /worldnews are, but reddit is kinda like the yahoo of news: lots of categories and that doesn't scale so well as we all know now.
Between corporate content, categories and so many human moderators it is going to be a battle as a viable business. My ad testing also showed a non-trivial percentage of their audience and traffic is <14 y/o.
There are very few scenarios where a person can be physically threatened by the nature of their information. In those rare situations, anonymity doesn't protect the individual because the information is likely only privilege to a small group.
To identify content of public importance, you would need to identify which people the information is important to geographically and then determine the demand via market forces and then determine the trustworthiness of the content by evaluating the individual sharing the information.
You end up with a trust structure tied to publishing capability on a geospatial information system.
Already building it!