I think what you are describing has a name: Reputation Systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system)

I think what you are describing has a name: Reputation Systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system). There seem to be more effective ones and less effective ones. Unfortunately sometimes economic incentives cause them to be gamed against real quality. E.g. think of shill online shopping reviews, and circular voting to boost reputation. In academic terms, that would be "citation rings" to promote their rankings. Like web rings, there are nice and friendly ones, and there are heavy, spammy clones of sites. I would expect the rise of junk-article, plagiarism-from-elsewhere, machine-learning-assisted-plausibility mutual citation rings if there were no good controls to detect and prevent that sort of thing.