The problem is that it's a tug-of-war situation and in a tug-of-war, you win by passing a minimum threshold; there's no such thing as a runaway victory. Rather

The problem is that it's a tug-of-war situation and in a tug-of-war, you win by passing a minimum threshold; there's no such thing as a runaway victory. Rather than leading to a kind of informational meritocracy, what you're talking about leads to the situation we're in now, where content that is perceived by some proportion of SE users as 'good enough' grows at a rate that is much faster than natural, and drowns out all other content. If you take advertising out of the equation then the motives for producing general-topic content revert to what they were a few years ago: personal expression, free expert opinion, community discussion, journalism in search of subscribers.