S/N reduction. Without this, it will be impossible to wade through the flood of papers. Too easy to hemmorage them out anymore.
There are self citations and citation rings. The signal is very week, even with the curren model.
> introducing “badges”
You reinvented journals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenfactor and other such indices are much less game-able
Peer review (as currently practiced) and closed access are the problems, not the quality signal provided by journal publication.