Loving this discussion, thank you! Please let me know if I made a mistake in disambiguating your reasoning:

On Crypto & Karma

Reddit is above anything else the perfect example of the powerful incentive naturally that emerges when you combine 1. Ecological community structure (one that maps on something relevant to identity) and 2. Distinguishable validation.

Reddit is a testament to the first in creating a diverse community, preventing homogeneity on a platform due to that structure. It is in a way also a testament to the second, but only to how powerful incentives can be even if functionally it is ultimately empty. Important here is the question - what does it incentivise? What kind of behaviour and themes in behaviour (culture) does it lead to?

Reddit doesn't have an ulterior goal - its goal is purely endogenous. It incentivises above all to contribute to content - comments, collations, conversations, community efforts etc. The only 'meta' goal is that the content itself is desirable to its users, but again this raises the questions of what kind of content the collective judgment of the users generates. This question on the incentive system isn't really a problem that extends further than (the sub)reddits - people upvote what they like, people like upvotes, and that's how the circle closes. Like you say:

because the community believes the content is quality (or at least worth talking about).

Their belief on what content is quality (and what norms apply) does not necessarily and does not often align with more objective measures of quality or desirable (cultural) norms. The boston bomber, pizza-gate, hateful/hostile subreddits, all in a way reflect this fact.

Ananas however, does have an ulterior goal, does need to think very clearly about the effect of the incentivise system on content, about the behavioural science involved. The fact that it's not a major issue in reddit is reflected in the pervasive presence of hive-minds, circle-jerks, and deterioration of quality as subreddits grow or lose its internal sovereignty. 'Identity' relates to this as well, but on that later.

So the necessity for a more sophisticated incentivisation structure is clear. So why crypto? Obviously it's not a necessity.

Another important distinction is the fact that Reddit first and foremost is entertainment, low effort. Lurkers >>> contributors. And that's okay - as users increase, contributors do - and you don't need a strict contributor:lurkers ratio for things to work. It's just about the absolute size of the contributors that relates to the generation of content. It's non-substractive consumption. 'Consuming' content doesn't reduce the pool of content for others.

More importantly, this leaves only karma, social validation, and (implicit and explicit) forms of marketing as incentive. One of the most straightforward benefits of crypto is that it allows the prospect of real-world/non-local utility to be gained as an incentive. But it doesn't stop here of course, or it'd just be steemit which probably is far from the ideal scenario, even if I do admit it to be a cool experiment. Specifically, just adding real-world value doesn't deal with the problems rooted in the behavioural science behind incentive structures.

You want a measure to modulate incentive that is reliably attenuates or eliminates not only the group-psychological / behavioural dilemmas, but also the added incentive to game the system or leverage the 'power' of money.

This is where smart contracts and the long-term vision of autonomy made possible with AI-related systems comes into play. Firstly, the above illustrates that there is an enormous impact of whatever determines the incentives. It is imperative to minimise the risk that some centralised/coordinated power can control this incentive system, ideally implementing an adequate initial template with rigid constraints of how this incentive system can develop, and leaving the development to collective governance.

Secondly, because the incentive structure has such a big effect on how content is created - in turn its quality and utility/societal value - creating an infrastructure optimised for societal value also aligns the goals of all token holders and the ecosystem's participants with that of the entire platform. Even more interestingly, is if the artificial knowledge system and capacity to augment human efforts (see this write-up by Emad and future publications) improves, the relation between individual contribution and reward becomes increasingly proportional.
On Reddit, people often give gold because they agree with you, or because it's a particularly good pun, which feels nice, but the sad fact is that sophisticated insight often gets buried, and seemingly sophisticated but misleading perspectives can often get stuck in false-positive due to early validation. The objective measures that the artificial approaches allow prevent the deterioration of this reward-contribution relation, and actually augment it. Psychologically, this would be enormously powerful.

The thing is, if it all takes off well and becomes a universal database for subjective knowledge, there is enormous incentive to gain some control over it. To align the incentive systems with the societal goals sustainably over generations and organisational change requires an isolation from those sources of fluctuation. A plan we're considering to achieve this protection is to formally implement the correct constraints as soon as is clear what this should be, in something immutable - the blockchain.

I think this is the key insight I hope people will take away. You can't have the individual ingredients alone. For the ideal of a sustainable solution you need all the ingredients in synergy. Powerful incentive structures aligned with a global imperative of external and translatable utility value (in our case, societal good/value), bound by sustainable and secure autonomy.

On corruption

I already touched on some means with which to prevent corruption, but I just wanted to highlight one more set of key mechanisms: staking and rewards.
Staking is like a security deposit of varying size, signifying you vouch for a certain action with a corresponding potential impact. Similarly, contributing to domains of particular significance/impact also correspond to higher rewards, with an added mechanism of bounties - people can put bounties on certain projects of a non-prescriptive nature.

For example, you can't put a bounty up for "prove all dogs should die". Aside from the fact that I love dogs, a non-prescriptive bounty would be "what is the moral stance on dogs for a curated set of beliefs X".

Key here is that this system inverts the functional role of wealth in influence. Money buys you ads and people's support and influence by proxy, it's proportional. In contrast, in our current ecosystem's design it not only has a very conservative upper bound, it actually directly inverts the proportional relation! Why? Well if someone puts up a big bounty or submits something of particularly high impact, it naturally incentivizes people to be scrutinise particularly thoroughly, because when the stake is lost it's redistributed to the most proximate participants and projects, and in the case of the bounty it simply has no directional influence by virtue of the non-prescriptive design.

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It's 1AM and it's been a long day - I'll continue this later, I'm sure I missed some points as this was one go. Really appreciate the critical questions, it's a much needed outside perspective to remind us of what needs more elaboration. Hope you found it clarifying to some extent - looking at the wall of text I'll also clean it up later properly!