No offense, Cat, but while I respect your attempt to inject some stability and to mock people for a rush to judgment here, I'm not inclined to dismiss that as mere conspiracy after the shit we've already seen happen multiple times this year alone. Moreover, the issue people take here is that we've already seen this kind of thing implemented on other sites.
Wikipedia, most notably.
Users on Wikipedia are rated on number of edits, not the quality thereof, so this allows the worst offenders to still have a big say in goings-on, even if the user in question is directly involved with causing issues. Even in the case of someone provably in a conflict-of-interest like Ryulong or someone who's just an open tard like Mark Bernstein, it can be a nightmare to leverage any real ability to hinder these problem users with the way this sort of thing angles out. Because they can stack arbitrations with friendly voices, they can often linger like a fucking metastasized tumor for years before any appreciable action is taken, even if they get caught red-handed. Hell, even if they do get banhammered, they often have led to a fucking permanent occupation by their buddies on the same articles.
An ongoing meme is that the way that Wikipedia's own system is set up right now has made it essentially impossible to salvage without banning basically everyone on it and re-writing a huge number of articles from scratch with rigorously enforced NPOV. Even the most conservative estimates of trying to fix the site state that there's an uphill battle ahead to save it.
It's not just Wikipedia, either. Community moderation has been tried on other platforms before, and it always, without exception, fucking fails unless it has aggressive oversight. Eventually, some vocal group or another will hit a critical mass size-wise, and then find a way to game the system, and the result is something we've all seen before, especially if you were active on political sites over the last decade. It's easy to be worried about Social Justice morons here, but we could just as easily see the /pol/ crowd try the same shit, and it would suck just as badly.
With this said, people are right to be worried. I'll agree with you that they probably should wait for more information to come in, so we don't see a repeat of some of the past non-issue worries (lol Youtube Red), but given the implications of what a system like this could do, you're going to see people in alarm bell mode, and for good reason.
I'll acknowledge that it's alarmist to immediately assume the worst on this one, but given how Google's history and increasing willingness to appease a small minority of unpleasant fucks, how do you expect people to take it? We already are in a world where coverage of certain parties has gotten mass-reported off Youtube, where posting a picture of John Flynt can get you permabanned from Twitter, and where posting on the wrong forum on Reddit will get you banned from like 12 others subreddits due to block bots.
There is an upside, though: It'll give us more sperging to cover at any rate.
