Everyone on HN is catching up to this, but what we are all realizing is we want actual user curation, trusted user curation.
Reddit is currently a good proxy because the best recommendations on Reddit for a question are upvoted reasonably democratically by the type of people you’d trust. For the time being the gamification of Reddit isn’t bad enough to be an issue here.
But that’s just a matter of time. As more and more people start using Reddit as the most authentic source of dependable information, folks are gonna start gaming that to the core as well, basically this is going to be a game like the Red Queen.
One possibility is that the search engine itself starts becoming like Reddit maybe? They clearly know what result you’re clicking, they could start making user similarities (or ask you for an explicit list of your peers) to find similar users and rank results based on what people like you click. Obviously google can do it easier since it knows YOu. But even DDG maybe able to do something like user curation or site blacklisting (and have popular lists like exist for tracking avoidance that you can subscribe to). This is the only solution IMO.
For example for any coding related search I’d be happy to rid of every top 10 result in google except SO. All the rest is garbage.
Maybe there’s also an upvote button. But the score is not universal but personalized to you based on votes from people you actually might trust.