In the spirit of governance experiments, I made a liquid reputation system.

The idea is simple: you have a position in a binary tree of voters, and can give reputation upwards to any number of people (within a certain proximity, so the Alex Jones scenario can not happen), or get reputation from below (within a certain proximity). Unlike in liquid democracy, giving does not decrease your own reputation, so this is not a voting solution, but a reputation system (the reputation could be fed into smaller voting systems, as needed). It also means that it is not a zero sum game. If your reputation is larger than your parents, you can switch places (so the system is not frozen, and it is hierarchic, but in a competitive way). 

The frontend and backend are still a bit rudimentary (and processes txs quite slowly), but check it out: https://anthilldao.dev/ The smart contract code is open source, there is a link to it on the website.

What do you think about this direction/general idea? I think it has some nice properties: 
- local to global, people allocate reputation locally but affecting the global hierarchy.
- representative. People cannot be expected to constantly vote on everything. 
- governance oriented. In standard liquid democracy, votes are assigned to make decisions, so the system is legislation oriented. In practice, people/groups have to be assigned roles where they can perform certain functions. This system can help with role allocation and can assign voting power to individuals in smaller groups if voting is required inside the group.  

Great post! My take on this is that we need trustworthiness and interoperability in these systems, this means they will need a single underlying crypto infrastructure. Once we have good scaling properties (cheap txs and high TPS, with the possibility for at least >10^5 but rather >10^7 TPS, with ZK rollups/Validiums (after all there are ~10^10 humans)) within a single ecosystem, we can start to lay down on-chain primitives, such as secret voting and proof of humanity/identity systems (although one can argue that identity is a governance problem, and so it should be solved in parallel with governance). Once we have all of this, we can start the experimentation of what the governance design should look like. 

When it comes to the governance question I don't think any of us have final answers, but I think that liquid democracy is also a great option, it has a local-to-global property, meaning people can assign their votes locally (this is what people are good at, evaluating people, and not complicated technical questions), and the votes can then be further reassigned. This means the system is simple, and understandable, while still allowing complex structures to emerge.