Reputation needs a way to be bootstrapped, otherwise you end up with a closed club of friends no one else can reach.

Well, actually it is worse, it becomes such that talented people with good ideas can't reach the top, but useless or evil people with talent for politician-style soft-talk and "networking" abilities (psychopaths) can reach much more easily.

To some extent everything is a bit like this and will always be, but we can get to a situation in which this plays a bigger or smaller role. Up to recently the field of "programming" was one in which talent played a more important role than in other fields on average.

The difference about what happens now, I think, will be whether we can figure out other filters to judge people's code projects and use or other attributes to base reputation on, rather than just small-world personal connections.