I hope you are right. One would really have to think about how to give users more control over the content they see. Allowing mods to tweak the sorting algorithm is a great idea to do this by the way.

Ultimately I think it is wrong that people put so much effort into social media and do not get rewarded for it in a meaningful way (and no, I don't consider a "like" or an "upvote" a sufficient reward). If we could find a way to reward people monetarily for producing and finding valuable content, that might lead to a huge increase in quality.

I have this theory for how companies could be built: look for where value in transferred on the internet (for example if someone watches a video on YouTube, value is transferred from the video producer to the viewer); then send bitcoin in the other direction. This model seems much more efficient to me compared to today's model where the value from the content consumer to the content produces is transferred through a sequence of intermediaries (social media sites, advertisers, advertising networks) that all take a cut.

Obviously one needs to think about the incentives for all actors, I do not think that donation based networks will work because there is really not much incentive to donate.