Being familiar with Louisiana political and social history, I would hesitate to refer to anything I considered positive as "the Huey Long algorithm." Part of the problem is that you feel comfortable thinking of the solution as an issue of economic redistribution – and that is essentially a failure of thinking of the same type that led us to the problems we currently have.

You are specifically thinking of "one man, one vote" as a better way of evoking the Wisdom of Crowds, and that's just not so. The underlying assumption that the collective is better able to determine what is good for the individual is a problem – THE problem.

As a result of that thinking, you have the conflation of allocated value/reward with discoverability. I don't have a problem with the way that the Steem blockchain allocates the reward pool, interestingly enough. It is stake-allocated, and that provides economic reward to those who have already sunk money in and that's what they want to promote more of. Actively confusing "what is most rewarded" with "good content" is the toxic intellectual position.

Every other platform that you are aware of that allows voting takes those votes to be signals to the platform about what the user wants to see more of, and then uses that information to show them more of it. They explicitly don't have that signal conflated with the means of allocating some sort of intentionally financial reward.

It is NOT the jackpot potential of the betting pool on Steem that eliminates curative purpose for votes, it's the fact that what users do on the Steem blockchain when they signal is explicitly not curation. Their signaling makes absolutely no difference to their experience on a short-term, straightforward basis.

The irony is that I've already written about all of this, a long time ago. Two years ago now, in fact.

Along with UI improvements you seem to have in mind, enabling discovery of content, how do you think that would impact Steem?

Okay, let's assume that I'm not going along with any Huey Long nonsense, but on top of getting to absolutely rearchitect the voting systems so that it's decoupled from the financial reward mechanism, altogether, the reward mechanism is based on a more deliberate tipping mechanism, we actually get a real Community mechanism and not this bullshit Community system that is slaved to SMTs…

How would that impact Steem?

It would be an entirely different product in every single way.

Nothing about it would be the same thing. Let's not lie to ourselves and say that it would. It would be an entirely different creature, not only in the user facing interface but in the underlying assumptions and in the way that they are reified in the user experience. Nothing about it would be the same.

We would just be building an entirely new social network platform.