I'd even take an imageboard with reddit or HN moderation over the reddit-style of social media sites we have today. I'd even allow mandatory registration if the posts themselves are still anonymous to other users

Anonymous posting prevents weird popularity cliches from taking over, and post linking via ID allows multiple conversations to flow much smoother than reddit's tree-structured comments. I'd also say that sequential ranking over popularity upvote would prevent as many low-effort hot takes/jokes from always being at the top of each thread, but I'm practice that doesn't really seem to play out like it should.