I've been advocating this for years, but I think a lot of problems on the internet could be solved with a universal, decentralized, anonymous reputation system.

I've been advocating this for years, but I think a lot of problems on the internet could be solved with a universal, decentralized, anonymous reputation system. A user or entity maintain a private cryptographic key. Each service is given a different sub-key which anonymizes the entity for each service, if they choose. A myriad of voting systems could be employed depending on the needs of each service, via other site users, site admins or both. These differing voting systems (stars, points, etc) could be normalized through some standardized process into a final reputation score. Other services could then either consider the aggregate score, or only focus on ratings from particular other services, which could be grouped into service types for convenience. Ratings are cryptographically backed and could be fuzzed to increase anonymity. Scores would also be weighted by the relative reputation of other entities. Participating services would also themselves need to maintain a high reputation for their scoring to have much weight in the aggregate. Services could use these scores to wall of certain site features to entities without sufficient reputation, or even wholesale deny read/write access. Obviously there are particulars to work out to prevent brigading, etc. but there is a balance to strike such that farmed accounts could still quickly be punished the moment they begin spamming/astroturfing. Perhaps a flag/vouch system similar to HN could be employed. Voting rings could also be detected, though with limits given that each vote comes from an anonymized sub-key. This system would even protect against a future where the majority of content on the web will likely be aided or entirely produced by LLMs or AI. I welcome such synthetic content, but only if it matches or surpasses the general quality of human posts on the internet (which is much worse than one might think). On top of this, users could themselves use these scores as a way to filter out content which is signed with a reputation score below some threshold. I imagine some kind of hierarchical web, where some services are harder to gain write access to than others, allowing users to gain reputation in low-stakes environments with some level of decentralized moderation, but without compromising the integrity of higher-stakes information. Each piece of information on the internet should be signed with some sort of introspectable reputation score, and this kind of system would make it possible without compromising privacy and security of users in any political environment.