There were experiments back in the day. Slashdot had one system based on randomly assigned moderation duty which worked pretty great actually, except that for the longest time you couldn't sort by it.

Kuro5hin had a system which didn't work at all, as you mentioned.

But the best was probably Raph Levien's Advogato. That had a web of trust system which actually worked. But had a pretty limited scope (open source devs).

Now everyone just slaps an upvote/downvote button on and calls it a day.