"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Your comment would be fine with just the second sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not really. The whole point of down and upvoting the sources is because the sources themselves might be erroneous. Without an infinite cascade of the process I described, relying on down and upvoting of specific claims is more tractable.

In other words, you might have a claim that's supported by an otherwise bad website, but the bad website actually has a morsel of legitimately factual evidence there. It would be up to the readers of the claim and sources to actually verify whether or not the underlying supporting evidence is true.

The other reason to do this is to build a corpus of "truth." Meta and Google are clearly capable of this, but choose not to do it for reasons.

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This is why it's important that the claim itself is not voted on, but rather the source. Otherwise brigading will happen (it can obviously still happen, but is less of a problem in face of some hypothetical pure truth).

I'd also add that inherently the problem of "determining the truth" requires consensus. What I'm proposing is simply a way to make said consensus be gathered transparently. Obviously there's no oracle of truth out there for us to consult and some variant of what I'm describing is inherently necessary.