Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and something that makes the profession harder to get into.

The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too.

Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.