If you make a platform 100% free and open, it will encourage low quality participants. The network effect often stops paid sites from starting, but the rewards are there if you can somehow otherwise select only for a mature audience.
Maybe it didn't work that way in the past, maybe it won't in the future, but the current environment seems to be very much like how the parent poster described it.
A variation on representative democracy would be to have a recommender system identify demographics, and then to weight each demographic equally. So, for example, the votes from the "blogspam fan" demographic would be normalized to one, to fairly compete for representation with the much smaller "long thinkpiece fan" demographic.
Another solution would be quadratic voting, where you can vote once for free, but the nth vote would cost (n-1)^2 reputation points. That would allow established community members to express their intense dislike of certain content, to balance out the larger population's mild preferences.
It would be pretty cool if there was Reddit, but each subreddit could implement a different voting system. We might see a lot of progress and experimentation.
My understanding from Walsh was that the problem was essentially an economics problem—you want to incentivize good behavior and deincentivize bad behavior—and once you understood this you could use the network to correct itself, essentially saying “if you use your upvotes like the typical user does then the typical user will trust you, if you use your upvotes like the typical spammer does then you’ll instead end up in a clique with typical spammers.”
Some googling reveals that the page is still alive on cornell.edu [1].
You've made me uncomfortable, so... thanks, I guess?
I wrote some thoughts in this vein a while ago funnily enough
I think the shorting will help with this, but I think the more critical thing is getting the initial community right to set expectations of what's upvoteworthy. Kind of how y'all started reddit around a programming community.
The people who won the award the most were the ones that upvoted all the memes and blogspam.
My point of this is not to discourage you, but to warn you that the way you've described your platform, the most "profitable" thing to do is not upvote good content but upvote the content you'll think the most people will upvote. So you'll need to adjust for that.