You can give yourself reputation with 100s of alternative accounts.

This is known as a Sybil Attack which is the main problem that IOTA, as I have linked in another comment in this thread. The way they deal with this problem is by assigning each node (user) a weight (reputation) so that users with more weight are more trusted. It takes a lot of time and posting (for good actors) and a lot of money (buying up accounts on the internet) for the bad actors. So the CIA can buy a trusted account for 1000s of dollars, and the moment they start to spew out propaganda, and users report them , they will start to loose that reputation fast.

So iota says, More mana = more messages read. So, within the community, there is a natural distribustion of users. Say 10% off the top users of a community constribute to most of the posts. Something like that, i can't remember exactly. So with such a system, the higher mana you have, the higher you are on the 'font page'.

But yeah, trust is very important in todays systems. I think users need to 'earn' trust within that community. BUT still allows new users to have a say. So with low mana/trust, their comment/posting will be limited, as well as having a visible indicator (we know we can trust accounts that are less then 1 week old on reddit) . But instead of opening their profile, it should be displayed next tot their username...something like that.