That’s really interesting. I’d be curious to see how it would work in the real world.
I think the distributed nature of Discourse (many small communities focused on particular interests) makes it less prone than large scale social networks to the issues that are described in the article. Discourse also doesn’t use either a follower model or an algorithmic model for ordering topics in the topic lists. By default, topics are displayed in the order they are created, with the most recently updated topics at the top of the list.
Probably the closest thing to Discourse topics being ordered by a “points” system would be to view a Discourse topic list ordered by likes, for example: https://meta.discourse.org/?order=likes. Using the likes filter, scores are calculated on a per topic basis, not on the reputation of the user who created them, so it’s not a great analogy of the points system that’s discussed in the article.
I think it would be possible to use Discourse to prototype a points system similar to what’s outlined in the article. I wonder how large of a community would be required to really test it out though.