The main challenge I see is to find a way to both reward good content (meaning content other people on the network deem useful, helpful or valuable) while also making it impossible for one individual or group to dominate the network through sheer monetary influence.

I am still thinking on this, a lot and I feel I am far from a solution at this point. One way would be that you cannot buy your stake only earn it through activity. Maybe a listing will be announced for X time in the future so that everybody can prepare accordingly and be free of monetary influence of the token price.

You have posted here for the long run, and I also have. We are all in agreement that quick riches is not what this place is about. The rewards should be a side effect of adding value to the community.

The issue with icp is that so many perpetual markets exist that can create huge artificial selling pressure that actually has an effect on the spot price. just like with the silver market. i really have to get into tokenomics more and find models that better represent a fair and free discourse platform.

This really all comes down to
1 - granting everyone the ability to judge for themselves what they find worthy and not interfere with that
2 - helping everyone to see fraud when it occurs and let it be up to them to take that information to heart.
3 - being ok if other people vote in a way you see as stupid or harmful

For example: I have zero problem with a bot that auto comments under a post that has been written 100% with AI, notifying those who would potentially vote on it to take that into consideration before voting. What I do have a problem with if someone can take it on himself to override the community's votes on said post, even for the right reasons.

That is where we disagree also, you and so many on here say it is not "your rewards" until actual payout, but what this in effect means that even if many people find a post worthy and upvote it, someone else with dubious intentions can come along and zero that author reward and the curators' rewards out, increasing the non-zeroed out rewards for himself and his gang with the stake majority. This wouldn't be such an issue were it not for the fact that huge money can buy cartel structures on Hive which is exactly the same shit we have in the financial system at large.

Prohibition never works to reduce harm because of the social side effects, it would be much better to point out why a certain substance is harmful to the user rather than banning it for everyone.

Maybe I am idealistic and naive - two traits that have preserved my optimism over these past 15 years wading through a swamp of system lies - but the world I want to live in leaves it up to everyone to decide, a system that incentivizes to appeal to people's moral and intellectual standards to be convinced not to vote for something rather than muffling their voice.

All of this of course has only gotten more complicated with the rampant use of AI and bots.

Essentially we are trying to solve the Kali Yuga task of finding a fair and proper governance system for human beings that somehow ALSO rewards people monetarily for their efforts and is at the same time immune to hostile takeover by some big nasty cartel players and intelligence agencies.

Will we make it? ahahaha, it's 2025, I don't know if humanity is ready. With steem and hive it clearly wasn't.