“This won’t work, for the same reason PageRank did not work”
I am very confused by this. Google’s search vastly outperformed its competitors with PageRank and is still using a heavily tweaked version of PageRank to this day, delivering by far the best search on the market. It seems to me that PageRank should widely be considered to be the most successful reputation algorithm that has ever been invented, having demonstrated extraordinary real-world success. In what way does it make sense to say “PageRank did not work”?
All old links will continue working. I’ve put quite a bit of effort into that, and this was one of the basic design requirements we built the site around.