I think the idea of wanting to improve the "content sorting" aspect of the chain is good, but downvoting content feels more aggressive then I like. (And I downvoted the post to get in the spirit of the topic, when you can only express an opinion in a binary way how do you say "good presentation of an idea I disagree with"?). Plus it's really hard to shake the instinct that downvoting someone is risky, if someone with a big stake chooses to hold a grudge they can make a small account's life miserable.
Part of the problem with the idea of the "wisdom of crowds" is that the assessments need to be independent. The mechanism of the chain, where your vote is a mix of both your own judgment of the post and also whether others have overvalued/undervalued it muddies the waters.
Rather than downvoting, I think it could potentially be more useful to somehow gamify ranking between posts. So you read N posts and put them in quality order without seeing anyone else's judgement, and then we can compare those virtual comparisons to the rewards to see how aligned they are.
I hope it's clear from the opening paragraph that I would also prefer a downvote-free solution. I agree that I'm not really a fan of downvoting, but in our current system I think that it's a necessary evil or a lesser of evils, however you want to phrase it. This suggestion is seeking something that's possible with the tools that are presently available.
I would probably prefer something like that, too, but the question is implementation. I don't know who would implement this, or how. Coincidentally, I recently watched a somewhat related video that talked about different forms of voting, including preferential ranking:
Thank you. Strangely, I was hoping that someone would. (and also that it wouldn't be too painful😉)