[notaround1111]

I've also noticed a large influx of new accounts posting low quality, politically charged comments in the past few months. You can find plenty of those in this thread.

I think its pretty likely that we're headed for an extinction type event for upvote based "anonymous" message boards like HN, reddit ... or at least a significant decline in their usefulness

[fermienrico]

What's a good alternative architecture that promotes quality content/comments and prevents regression short of manual compilation, moderation and curation?

Edit: Jotting down some ideas:

1) Occlude/Delude/Fog-up the votes for newly created accounts. Mature accounts get to see gray posts.

2) Consesus amongst mature accounts has higher weight over newly created accounts.

3) Penalty for being flagged is higher for mature accounts as with power comes responsibility of good behavior.

4) Karma should have more meaning that just a tally of points. Upvoting costs Karma (-1 from balance). So, people are more careful and have to strongly agree to upvote. Probably some caveats and downsides here.

5) Buffer out the oscillations of upvotes/downvotes. Sort of like a mass-spring-damper system.

6) Hire moderators that are vetted and publicly funded by HN members.

7) Verified accounts with work email or some other means. These accounts would have the highest weight in anything they do.

[darawk]

I think you essentially need something pseudonymous and reputation based. Something where getting banned has a reasonably high cost in terms of re-acquiring reputation required to post.

[rwmj]

Slashdot only gave out a small number of moderator points per day (5 IIRC). Also you could not moderate and post on the same topic, which means you cannot downvote opposing views so easily.

[Redoubts]

"I've also noticed a large influx of new accounts posting low quality, politically charged comments in the past few months."

This is why you should flag every political submission to HN.