I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to discourage the nastiness. There was still plenty of it, but on Usenet, you could add the guy who enraged you to the point of blinding rage to your ignore file... and you could add the two guys who refuse to ignore each other to your own ignore file. In the Weblog space you could just, you know, not read that other blog that infuriates you. On custom forums the community was small and tended to evict people.
It was not paradise. But it was more workable, when the platforms weren't designed by PhDs to seek out and exploit your outrage for their ad clicks.
ejecting jerks is something forums did better than social media, even if the definition of jerk varied widely and was forum-specific. I can't imagine a forum doing something like promoting the user with the most interacted with posts; they'd probably lock the thread and consider banning
The undercurrent here for me is barriers to entry and monopolies and network-effects, ex:
Con: You had to search to find a community.
Pro: There were lots of independent communities that had competition in case one was badly moderated.
And if you did that now you'd probably have no forum left because everyone has been trained to generate engagement.
Has it been tried?
I mean, it is a common moderation goal, in physical meetings, to make sure the silent ones gets heard.
Could be interesting to try a social network approach om those terms: promotion inversely correlated with engagement.