I wonder how much companies could benefit from a human oracle. The way HackerNews gives weight to votes is interesting and relevant.

First, a human marks certain users as very legit. There need only be one marker. Next, the users those marked users mod-up in the normal course of the site are added to a white-list of users that can submit at any rate.

This wouldn't be hard, would be completely opaque to the users, and would avoid annoying messages thrown at your most active real users.

There are many, many problems with reddit.