Sorry if the title comes off a bit arrogant. I've only been here a few days, but I have a good eye for these things. I appreciate all the work the devs do and mean no disrespect by anything I write in this post. I'm super excited about Steemit because it has vast potential and I want to see it TO DA MOON!!!11 That being said, with vast potential comes vast room for improvement.

This community's primary goals should be:

• generating creative content
  • getting that content to people who want to experience it
• gaining trust from the general public
  • equating hard work with success
  • aiming for free-to-play instead of pay-to-win
  • squashing the potential pyramid scheme that could overtake Steemit
  • improved decentralization
• constantly trying to evolve Steemit to solve problems
  • preventing people from trying to exploit the blockchain.
  • eliminate bots/spammers/plagiarism/etc.
  • add forum style discussion

Steemit gives great incentive to content creators. It feels amazing that currency is literally being made of thin air when people hit the upvote button. This is top notch work and I'm absolutely blown away by this site's ingenious design. The problem is that the site also gives great incentive to plagiarize, bot, spam, and exploit.

Flag Bounties Required

Curation rewards are an amazing mechanic, but we need to take it one step further. For Steemit to grow into the best social media outlet of all time, a reward needs to be added for flagging bad content in addition to curating good content. I've already discussed the advantages of micro-charges. By applying the same micro-deposit incentives with flagging as we do with curation, Steemit will instantly be cleared of most it's undesirable content and behavior.

Flagging content should cost voting power and work almost exactly the same as curation. When an account has been rightfully flagged it should be punished by losing Steem Power. The one's who flagged the content should each receive a cut of this SP.

Steem Power broken?

When I first heard about this mechanic I thought it was great. It's a currency that measures how much the community trusts you. Then I found out you can buy it. WHAT?! It's design like this that really really makes this site look like a pyramid scheme. You shouldn't be able to buy integrity. Steem power decides where the majority of money on the entire blockchain goes. Being able to buy this kind of influence is a huge red flag that only serves to centralize the economy. It also completely undermines the option to get paid in all Steem power.

Steem power is a measure of how much the community trusts you to distribute community money fairly. Obviously, we only want to give massive amounts of SP to the most incorruptible community members. It stands to reason that there needs to be a severe way to punish whales that try to exploit this community. That's where my previous flagging idea comes in. High SP players will be under constant scrutiny because penalties will be percentage based. The monetary and reputation (SP) penalty/rewards to catch a whale abusing the system will be much higher than a minnow. Whales need to be held to a very high standard. If they can't handle it they should power down.

For example, lets say I got flagged for doing something stupid like copyright infringement because I put a Star Destroyer in my post. No big deal, maybe I lose 1% of my SP for that infraction. I'm a small minnow so that would be less than 1 SP, and I learned early that I'm not allowed to do that. However, 1% to a whale could be huge. Also, multiple counts of the same infraction should increase the penalty. 1%, 2%, 3%, etc.

If it isn't already, SP should be weighted logarithmically to further promote decentralization. A person with ten million SP shouldn't have a much louder voice than someone with a million or even 100,000, but a person with 1000 should be significantly more influential than someone with 500. I'm not quite sure what the equation should be... just that it should have log in it.

Weighted Search Lottery

SP should also affect how likely it is for your posts to get seen at the top of a list of posts. Every post should have its own SP value equal to the SP of the poster plus the SP of every upvote. This SP should then be run through the logarithmic algorithm. This new value creates the post's weight (or volume, loudness, whatever). The chance of a post getting the top slot should be its weight divided by total weight of all posts competing for that spot. Randomization should occur independently on every device so that everyone sees posts in a different order, effectively creating a weighted search lottery.

Age of the post should also effect post weight (newer is heavier). Filters should be added to filter out dolphins and/or whales if desired. I would add a scroll bar from 1% to 100%. A filter bar at 95% would signify you don't want to see the posts of the top 5% Steem Power users. An age filter also needs to be added, because you know hackers have already done it, so the cat is out of the bag. The most popular ages people are looking for are between 15-30 minutes for curation purposes.

Steem Power should not effect the order of new or promoted posts. A promoted post's weight should simply be how much money went into the promotion or, even better, struggling minnows with low SP should have even higher promo weight (inverse log SP function).

Add Trials and Jurors

Steemit is in an incredible position to show that it's community is actually a form of micro-government. This is a world first opportunity for a website linked to blockchain technology. When someone gets enough flags to get in trouble, how do we know that they actually deserve to lose SP, and that SP given to the ones who flagged? With trials of course!

When someone gets flagged enough to be punished, allow them to double down, risking double the SP they would have lost, in order to start a trial. They can always choose to take their punishment (no contest) at a reduced fine. Steemit can pick x number of 'random' people (let's say 12) to review the offence. Jurors are paid the same (all SP) no matter what the outcome of the trial is (maybe allocate 1% of the blockchain). Jurors aren't provided with the identities of the other jurors, or even the defendant. Using majority rules, a vote decides guilt or innocence. Ties go in favor of the accused (or chose an odd number of jurors). In the case of innocence, punishment should possibly fall onto the false accusers if the vote of innocence was unanimous.

Multiple Reputations

Because there many different things you can do on Steemit there should be a reputation associated with each thing. A content creator is not necessarily a good curator, and a curator is not necessarily a good juror. Flagging and being a juror could be considered similar, and their reputations consolidated into one rep. By having multiple reputations we'll know who is good at what, and can assign weight accordingly.

Decentralize Decentralize Decentralize

Anything we can do to decentralize the blockchain while guarding against exploits will make this site stronger. We should be thinking about this constantly. For example, should whales be able to band together and simply like their own stuff? Perhaps the blockchain should be looking for bell curve distributions when giving out rewards. Keep and open mind and always be thinking about how to stop the rich getting rich and the poor getting poorer. Blockchain tech and greed do not mix.

Free to Play and Forums

We don't want people to think they have to pay to get their post viewed. Let's give everyone a free self-promotion every few weeks. I'm spending over $30 to promote this post because I believe in it, but the value of SBD is over $10 so it looks like I'm spending less than $3. I'll save this for another day though.

On this same note, I feel like I get more views and responses on just about every forum I've been on. We should add forums for people to ask questions, raise concerns, and get answers, rather than for creative content. I've hit the sidebar so many times looking for a forum. At the very least there should be a tiny one dedicated for site and community topics only... like this post for example.

Conclusion

I have high hopes for Steemit, but I worry that it's already too centralized, or that it will become so very soon. I fear that, because of this, there is already a conflict of interest to decentralize the block chain. Even though doing so would be good for everyone, people in charge may choose not to, and sell out the blockchain for short term profits. Please don't let Steemit turn into the Myspace of a Facebook world. If we don't constantly ensure that the blockchain stays decentralized, someone else will, and Steemit will be no more. Thanks for reading this wall of text. Stay classy.