I guess there's one thing I should make one thing clear at the outset: while this system has some slight relationship to the current reputation system on Hive because I hope to replace that reputation system with this one, they operate entirely differently.
As simple of example of the profound difference in the two systems, note that people will get individualized rating information. In other words, the rating provided by your system for a piece of information can and often will be different from the scores seen by other people.
Nonetheless, I'm sure there will be attempts to game any reputation system and the design I'm envisioning will still involve some personal responsibility by people to manage how well their rating system works. In fact, I think there will be some competition created to personally improve the performance of individual rating systems, to act as reliable sources of information for others, as this itself can be one way to earn reputation and influence.
But is a reputation system needed? It sounds to me like something like a trust score you can trust, but you shouldn't trust always.
If people think about what they've read, should be work better. I can only talk for myself, but I don't care about the reputation points.
But I get the point, it's easier to filter bad (extreme) content out if people have a bad reputation. But all positive reputation is under the line the same I would expect.
From this site, I would agree that's needed.
Offtopic: Besides Upvotes, I would like to see a like button. Why? Upvote is IMO more of some supportive thing and alike can anyone place. It would maybe people feel more comfortable using Hive. Because people all the time care about rewards.
If the reward would be "donation/support vote", it's hard to blame this.
I think with the current distribution of hive, we will never see a high payout make up tutorial or something similar.
But that's what average users care about. So alike can make the content creator feel good without high payouts. I would see no negative (besides spam), it can be in any case a positive thing.
About spam, hive needs to accept, social media = some kind of low-quality content/spam content. If some billy makes pictures from cats, its close to spam :D