Their response to this concern on the FAQ at Kickstarter is as follows:
"No one has yet made an effective attempt to leverage the strengths of the Internet to improve the quality of information we consume, at the place that we consume it. In essence, we are bringing crowd-sourced peer-review to the event horizon where information is produced—the thousands of news sites and blogs on the Internet. To encourage quality, we will employ a reputation framework.
We’ve closely researched over 20 current and previous online projects such as ReframeIt, SpinSpotter, ThirdVoice, Stickis, Fleck, ShiftSpace, WebClipper, zBubbles, and others – as well as offline efforts such as FAIR and Media Matters. All have key conceptual flaws which ultimately are or were fatal limitations on their effectiveness and scalability. Hypothes.is is a direct result of our conclusion that previous efforts have missed the essential ingredients of success, and has been designed to address each of them."
