If you have an upvote/downvote system that requires authentication, thresholds of useful upvoted activity to unlock (like HN), and perhaps some kind of spending

If you have an upvote/downvote system that requires authentication, thresholds of useful upvoted activity to unlock (like HN), and perhaps some kind of spending or at least account balance, you could have a reasonable front page and subforums, and the discouraging noise you describe would only come up if you manually paginated or manually searched/filtered for it. Assuming wide enough usage by the public.