Great nuancing post :]
Ultimately I do think a lot can be achieved with social systems. But with anything I think there’s also caveats that can go spectacularly wrong.
Just two off the top of my head.
Comparisons when the audience isn’t comparable.
This is pretty much the features vs niche-internals from: Cred Rebalancing: A Props-Oriented "CredSpective" - #32 by Beanow.
Take Signal for Android. Looks like 6 maintainers, >200 contributors (as defined by GitHub) and around 50-100M downloads.
A discussion on whether the Giphy integration should be removed, vs whether the right elliptic curve is being used… it’s not even remotely fair to compare.
It’s said this is why we’re inclined to believe authorities. Because we can’t all be experts, we’re at least reasonable at deciding who might be, and boosting whatever they say.
(Delegated voting? 
)
Overly normalized contributions.
Plenty of contributions seem obvious and easy on the outside, but in reality are hard to pull off. They might be dismissed as trivial or long overdue, rather than valued for what they are.
Imagine paying for Wikipedia! Imagine browsers with a subscription!
Things that are often overlooked as just there and normal now, kids these days might even age-shame me for such dated examples. It’s easy to forget how much you use them, or what it took to create (and still takes to maintain).