Like all good forums, if it does really well to the point that the general public takes interest, it will likely become crap. That isn't an inevitability, it's

Like all good forums, if it does really well to the point that the general public takes interest, it will likely become crap. That isn't an inevitability, it's a consequence of poor forum design. At one time, if water started leaking into your boat, it sank. Then someone had the bright idea of pumping the water out and sinking was no longer inevitable. One mechanism that might prevent the dilution you describe is to hide low-scoring comments from low-karma users, but show them to high-ranking users. Then the high-karma users can exert influence on the low-karma users by upvoting quality comments and downvoting poor ones. It becomes a self-organizing system with a bias towards quality, rather than the open loop 'majority rules' system currently in place.