"A lay-person can quickly grasp that a Nature or eLife or PLoS Biology paper is considered more trustworthy by the scientific community than a random blog post.

"A lay-person can quickly grasp that a Nature or eLife or PLoS Biology paper is considered more trustworthy by the scientific community than a random blog post." That is a false dichotomy. The IACR eprint archive is an example of an alternative approach, in which researchers self-host a repository of papers; the only reason eprint does not have formal peer review is that, thanks to inertia and academic politics, we are still forced to deal with Springer etc., so that is where peer review winds up happening. There is no particular technical reason peer review could not be performed via something like eprint; it is not hard to imagine eprint having a special section for higher-quality papers that have been formally reviewed. Peer review is already done by volunteers, and the journal format is totally obsolete at this point (most of the crypto conferences I have been to over the past few years have not bothered printing proceedings for everyone, because bound proceedings are irrelevant: people just access the papers they want via the web, or they have already read the paper on eprint before it is published "officially"). I understand the concern about pseudoscience and the general public, but how are journal publishers, or journals as a format, actually helping? Plenty of pseudoscience journals are floating around, often with names that are similar to mainstream journals, and cranks typically publish their articles in those journals to make references to their work appear more legitimate. If people in general can distinguish pseudoscientific articles from actual science, why do you think they can distinguish pseudoscientific journals from legitimate journals?