Praying for the day of google's collapse, (most) social media's demise, and an alternative business model to ads.
Even if you work out a way that "Professor blah has a higher value opinion than John Smith", this won't always be the case. Sometimes the majority are right, sometimes authority is wrong, sometimes publish views change over time, sometimes truth is hidden for "higher" reasons so I don't really see where we end up.
That said, for things that probably are largely uncontraversial like "a good way to write a prime sieve in Erlang" or something, it's probably going to give a pretty decent response.
There ARE better and worse ideas, even in the opinions space, I daresay. Perhaps not always right or wrong ones, but they can be sorted more effectively than they currently are, I believe.
Reddit, Hackernews, Quora, all provide examples of what a better model might look like. There's more open discussion, upvotes and downvotes, etc. People have the opportunity to synthesize and draw their own conclusions.
This just got me thinking - if the internet was indeed populated only by bots, would they use ads to market to one another, and if so, what would these ads look like?