Indexing information is a political problem as much as a technical one. Ultimately there will always be people who will put more effort into getting their information known than others. These people would game whatever technical solution exists.
Thats true. What if you could artificially limit the amount of effort someone can put in to getting content out there? Or even make it known to the consumer how/why the content is ranked highly?
Most closed platforms do a subset of what you mention: I can only put so many posts on my Facebook before they stop making it to all my friends. If I pay more for higher ranking itβs labeled an advertisement.
However, creating rules transitions the contention point to who makes the rules. If you think that my algorithm will rank my sources better than your sources, you may be less interested in my algorithm regardless of its technical merits.