I'm personally not a fan of ranking algorithms, and I do believe that they are a big part of the negative things we see happening with social interaction online. That said, there are some formats which necessarily require some type of ranking algorithm, link aggregators and forum sites being prime examples. I've come across one I think is simple and useful enough, it can be found here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/docs/src/about_r... and I don't think you really need much more to keep relevance at the top without encouraging or discouraging certain topics or behaviors.