The problems with rating systems for content is they can often lead to brigading to suppress/promote content. At which point, you're on an infinite whack-a-mole marathon to curb that sort of behavior.
That's a good point, but what about a rating system that isn't directly user generated? Imagine that information on the number of times an article/content is viewed, and the length of time that content is viewed was used to generate a rating for that piece of content. There could probably be other indirect factors for "content weight" that could go into the rating.
One notable result is that content gets padded to extract the longest possible attention, so now that 10s fix for an issue takes 2 minutes to find.
Not a problem platforms care about, probably helps them, sucks for users though -- it becomes 'how bad can we make things and still have people use our service'.
I would prefer manual curation. That doesn't scale, I know. But for people to learn to do it efficiently together, they need to learn to do it individually first. And only, after we scaled it with humans, we could begin to think how to automate anything.
This already sort of happens. Many larger sites, places like HuffPo or TechCrunch, accept contributions from outside contributors. You get paid a tiny bit, and then you get to link back to your own site, so you get a little marketing juice too.
A platform would be interesting too, but it’d be hard to curate without all the standard race to the bottom tactics that people would use to exploit your page rank.
In some sense, you can’t avoid the need to commit to a brand and a voice. So the way to achieve what you want is by federating with other brands and voices, not dumping into an anonymous platform.
Why? Because when you are out researching the next piece, someone else's article is being read.
That way you build an audience.
Wait, you say. I don't want my content on someone else's platform?
That's okay, the "platform" just links back to the long form content. It can even have ratings, which are even more important in long form content.