The whale support model makes sense for bootstrapping -- directing existing curation power toward Signal Scouts creates real incentive without requiring external capital. The tricky design question is how you prevent the incentive from attracting low-quality annotation once the rewards become visible. That's what killed the Steemit blogging reward model; the signal degrades as soon as the payout is large enough to attract gaming.

A few mechanisms worth thinking through: time-weighted curation (annotations that hold up over days/weeks get more weight than ones that spike immediately), and some form of staking that gets slashed if annotations are consistently ignored or downvoted. Neither is easy to implement, but without something like that, the Scout rewards will attract the same dynamics that plagued early Steem.

The distribution constraint is still real regardless. Even with good incentive design, you need a critical mass of readers on the same URL who have Signal installed. What's the current activation strategy for that layer -- is the bet on organic Hive community adoption first, or is there an external reader acquisition angle?