dogcharlietree: very sensible post
tailwheel: mods have a difficult job.
My suggestion: in some online versions of popular newspapers (eg UK Daily Mail) readers of comments (posted by other readers) on articles on the website can vote approve/disapprove on these posts.
Each poster ID only gets one such vote on each post by other readers.
See here for an example:
Shear lunacy: No beating about the bush for gardener who brought in a CRANE to mow his lawn | Mail Online
In the Mail's system, readers can select to read
only those previous posts which have the best ratings.
Suitably tweaked for Pprune, this would mean that we could choose to read only the posts which had been judged by the majority of previous readers of that thread to be worth reading. Equally, we could choose to see all, and skip past those that had a net negative rating.
Huge saving of time and effort for readers of long threads, and those posts attracting high negative scores might help mods focus their efforts.