People don't divide cleanly into good actors vs bad actors. Feedback mechanisms such as karma and downvoting on HN allows people to learn how to behave within the community. The better the feedback mechanism, the better people will behave.

Properly weighting the votes from each user would allow more effective moderation to be crowdsourced from the whole community. Everyone should be a moderator, but only with the degree of authority that he has earned.

That weighting can be done with a technical approach as has been proven by search* companies. How does Google deal with the fact that there is no moderation on the web in general, and a multibillion dollar incentive to manipulate their results? Google results are really clean and usable despite the above limitations. Their approach is purely technical.

This proposal is an effort to enhance the ability of the crowd to moderate HN more effectively by improved weighting.

*Note that Google is almost solely a ranking problem, and the the term "search" is a bit of a misnomer. If you could see the bottom ranked matches for any query I'm sure you would see plenty of unsavory content, but the first results (the ones you actually see) are really clean.