Second, if "poor members" get invited in large numbers, then the system you propose will fail, because they get to dictate what is good or not (by upvoting it), which will in term make them appear good (because they like/submit the 'good stuff').

Moderation has been a feature of complaint across every web forum (and many non-web forums) I've ever been a part of.

See, for example, the comments here (and even there) about StackExchange; 4chan; suicidegirls (NSFW) "spring cleaning"; the HUGE amount of meta / drama on Wikipedia (ANI alone is gigabytes of guff stretching over years about moderating that community. The holy books of millennia old religions are smaller than ANI. International trade argrements are smaller than ANI.)

But this meta bike-shedding has also been a feature of older systems. It's frequently created flame wars on Usenet - leading to various trolling groups sporging Usenet feeds. It's a feature of mailing lists.

I don't know what the average[1] age of HN is, but here's a result from a Usenet search for results before 1990 - before a lot of HN would have been born.

(https://groups.google.com/groups/search?safe=off&q=moder...)

(Also, Google, please give me a shorter URL option to cut n paste. Don't make me have to learn what your URLs are doing; don't expect me to use a nasty URL shortener (which are blocked on many boards)).

Here's a mildly interesting message discussing some of the problems of moderating Usenet:

(https://groups.google.com/group/mod.comp-soc/msg/ee189feb225...)