One possible solution would be peer to peer curation where each peer curate its own content and where you can (this is a feature of the software / network) "follow" or "trust" others peers or organizations, and break this link when you find something weird about them or don't trust them anymore. It's obviously what we already do but there's no general framework to gather theses data in one place and create our own personalized search engine. This doesn't immediately solve the "fake news" or "payed reviews" issues but would let people that are concerned by it, to hide theses content in their web surfing.
This would be also a very pro active process on the user side, and you would need people interested in that in order to build the software or network, there is a long way to convince regular people about the utility of such a tool and active approach.
The two major ways currently used for curation seem to be 1. aggregation of some measure of approval (upvotes on HN, likes on Facebook) and ranking based on that, or 2. sharing with contacts (retweets on Twitter). You could try combining them and would likely end up with something similar to what ttoinou suggests in a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15734474) [Which I have thus curated. Funny how that works.]
I think those measures work very well. However, they apparently don't promote enough of the content you like. But that's not the fault of the curation mechanism, it's due to the preferences of the curators. Most people just aren't very interested in "truth that is healthy and right".
It's very easy to use existing curation mechanisms to filter out most of the stuff that doesn't interest you (I have never seen an instance of the "fake news" phenomenon); but you aren't going to get everyone else to do the same.
>promotes truth that is healthy and right
Sounds like some kind of dystopian future
Since you asked, Float[1] is my attempt at solving this problem:
It's basically a web platform for you to save your best/favorite links and websites and the idea is that you can explore other users' profiles and see what they have saved.
If you really enjoy their links, you can follow them and create your own little "HN" feed of links from the people you follow. You can also browse links by tags or domain.
I just made it public so it's kinda empty but hopefully some of you like it and share your links! Here's the "about" page for more info: https://float.am/tour
[1] https://float.am
I think something that created a graph of assertions and logical dependencies between them would be really cool! Crowdsource assertions and assumptions (dependencies on other assertions) for each article. For example: "Russia hacked the DNC" or "The CIA has the ability to impersonate Russian hackers" would both be assertions and you could browse content that depended on either of those assertions or on logical children of those assertions.
The coolest thing is that it would actually make a distilled "skeleton of beliefs" that supported each perspective. You could quickly understand alternate points of view by skimming the assertion graph. It would encourage critical thinking about one's own perspective as well. You could even do belief "theory-crafting" by toggling beliefs on or off and seeing what the logical consequences would be for different claims credibility.
Instead of disagreements turning into character attacks it could be a very discrete "you agree with assertion [url to assertion and evidence/counter-evidence] and I do not."