"Even with everything @smooth is doing, there is only so much content that his team of curators can process."
********
What prevents that other whales follow @smooth example? Back in late 90's Google also was using the dmoz.org directory to weight their results and the dmoz.org directory was/is human made with thousands of editors (curators).

> This means that whales need to spread their votes across 1000 times as much content as normal users or refrain from voting all together.

Unfortunately, I think this suggestion will [enable the vulnerability that allows pacts to form that can game the voting system](https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed).

Afaics, the design is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Damned if you do, and Dan'med if you don't. (Lol just humor, no offense)

> The finite limits of whale attention limits the scalability of reward distribution.

And the finite cognitive bandwidth limit, [as the diversity of communities outstrips a whales' engagement and understanding](https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed#@anonymint/re-anonymint-re-nanzo-scoop-re-anonymint-re-nanzo-scoop-re-anonymint-blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed-20160811t042858237z).

> Some savvy whales, such as @smooth, are actively hiring people to process content and vote on their behalf.

I think that is a mistake, not only for the reason I stated above, but also because it [places a slow-moving, rigid top-down mgmt structure on the spontaneous formation of new communities within the ecosystem](https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed#@anonymint/re-anonymint-re-nanzo-scoop-re-anonymint-re-nanzo-scoop-re-anonymint-blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed-20160811t042858237z). I've been having many discussions with @smooth and unfortunately I have observed that @smooth was the moderator (censor!) for the Monero Speculation thread on BCT and he seems to relish a role as a top-down censor. I hate censorship (meaning any top-down influence on content). I believe in self-forming coteries and the highest degrees-of-freedom.

> The root of all authority must be derived from stakeholder Steem Power or Sybil attacks will quickly undermine the algorithm.

But can't stake be Sybil attacked by free signup "air drop" accounts?

> you let each account link to other accounts that they trust to allocate funds and curate content then the result is a massively recursive delegated voting system. Allowing links to have positive and negative weights means that everyone has the power to contribute to filtering the “good” people from the “bad” people.

Yes a Web of Trust (WoT) is a self-forming coterie and is normally a solution, but the problem is you are taking the funding from the globalized debasement, thus the WoT can be gamed because that globalized resource will always be a winner-take-all power vacuum vulnerability. It appears to be fundamental, but I am open to hearing about novel solutions.

> So long as there are many more “good” people than “bad” people, the bad actors are quickly neutralized by having more negative links than positive links.

Problem again is the air drops can be Sybil attacked. And even real people can enjoin pacts to achieve the winner-take-all because those who don't will be at a disadvantage. In a very abstract way it is analogous to selfish-mining.

> Once we have limited the number of links it is simply a matter of spreading the calculation over time and prioritizing calculations that will effect the biggest changes. So long as the rate at which links can change is slower than the rate at which the algorithm can reach equilibrium then on average the network will remain close enough to equilibrium to accomplish the desired goal.

Perhaps use the Follows list. I am not disputing the power of a WoT, but that localization of discernment power is game theoretically subverted (destroyed) once you use it to award a redistibution from the collective. Essentially you are conflating popularity and local preferences.

Maybe this is a stupid question but how to set default  page rather than trending? I don't want to see trending anymore (I think trending should not be the default page ).

So many possible games and vulnerabilities are opened with something like this. I'm not saying it isn't worth thinking about and doing, just that it needs to be designed and tested very carefully before allowing it to affect either content/curation payout or witness scheduling.

For example, the last time I was thinking about designs for curation delegation I got overwhelmed by how the design needed to be sophisticated enough to prevent games that allowed a user with a certain amount of Steem Power have multiple times more influence than what their SP would normally give them simply by sequentially changing their delegation of curation influence to their various sockpuppet accounts over time and allowing those "unique" sockpuppets to all cast their unique votes on the attacker's own posts which would give them very nice rewards. I'm sure the Account Rank algorithm will need to be designed very very carefully to avoid games like that as well.

Regarding the computational cost. At first glance it does seem like it would be very heavy to do something like this. But also, I don't agree that it necessarily has to be broken up into chunks that can be completed in less than a block interval. If you allow the Account Rank weight/reputation changes/effects due to operations on the blockchain to be sufficiently delayed, you no longer are limited to single threaded computation. Those calculations can be done in parallel with normal block production, and the outcomes of those calculations are then expected by the consensus protocol to be incorporated into the database state at some fixed number of blocks later.

> Using the Account Rank algorithm we could replace and eliminate the overhead associated with tracking and tallying witness votes. Instead the witnesses would be the top accounts by Account Rank that didn’t opt out of being a witness.
> ...
> Each user would simply add their 30 most trusted curators (aka friends) to their account and the Account Rank algorithm will automatically distribute influence among the friends.

Distributing influence over curation (i.e. deciding how content/curation rewards are paid out to various post) is very different than distributing influence over selecting block producers. The people I would trust to do a good job reliably operating a node (or even the people I would trust to select the people running the nodes) are not the same people I think produce good content on Steem nor are they the same people I trust to curate good content. And for that matter none of these people are necessarily the same people who I think are just the most trustworthy individuals period (in a web-of-trust sense). I want more separation of power / roles, not less.

side note: Google got rid of pagerank.

<center>This is how I think of @smooth</center>
<center><img src="https://www.steemimg.com/images/2016/08/10/WhaleSilhouette10ba98.jpg" alt="WhaleSilhouette10ba98.jpg" border="0" /></center>

I love the idea of implementing what google has done. It's still hard to wrap my mind around the entire concept, but I understand that basically the most helpful content moves to the top, which is why when you search for content on google the most popular and helpful content rises to the top and less helpful content gets put farther down. 

Google sells ad space though so there is a major difference, since a company can buy a top spot with money that may or may not be any good. I actually have an idea to ad advertisers to steemit without being intrusive. Something new users could really benefit from. [Proposal to Bring Non Intrusive Ads To Steemit](https://steemit.com/steemit/@bendjmiller222/proposal-to-bring-non-intrusive-optional-ads-to-steemit)

I think the newer system you have just wrote about will allow scalability. I still wonder how new user content will be found when steemit content comes in as fast as a redditt or twitter. The "New Feed" would almost need to be real time, but that is a problem that can be addressed as needed.

The problem with flagging right now I talked with @smooth and a few other heavily vested users and would love for you to take a look at the possibility of changing part of the way flags/downvotes are current;y done to make sure those who downvote are made to give a reason as to why to prevent "flag spam" or downvoting for just disagreement or jealousy. [New Content Flagging System With Feedback](https://steemit.com/steemit/@bendjmiller222/new-content-flagging-system-with-feedback).

While most people beg whales for votes, I told @smooth I care more about his opinion right now than his upvote, becasue I know that these two proposals may add a lot of value. 

Excited to see all the changes that roll out @dantheman. Keep up the good work. It does not go unappreciated.

they are just being the bobble head...they shouldn't be ignored or left out.

**TL;DR: Use curation voting as a proxy for trust. This eliminates explicit trust-voting, and leverages the solid engagement we already have with curation voting.**

Something like this proposal sounds like the right way to go. Here's my thought: requiring people to pick 30 people they know and vote for them sounds like a recipe for people to get "stuck" in positions that they shouldn't be in. We've seen this over and over again in Bitshares where a witness needs to be voted out, but the only way to do it is for whales to coordinate. **Why don't you make the voting implicit?** We already have active voting on the network in the form of people voting for articles. It should be possible to leverage that voting activity to build an account-rank. 

Here's a flippant, poorly-thought-out implementation: 
1. Everybody has a "seed" account rank determined by something like their SP.
1. We track the last week's worth of votes cast by each account, and make a list of the top 60 accounts voted for by each account
1. Then, you multiply the # of votes cast for each account by each account's account-rank, and the result is that account's new account-rank.

It doesn't sound computationally intensive; there aren't any matrix inverses or anything like you have in page-rank. You'd have to check if the algorithm converges and all that.

On the topic of bad voters, I just wrote a post about a Python program I wrote for hunting bots, based on how they upvote with interesting results: [Hunting bots with Python](https://steemit.com/programming/@bitcalm/hunting-bots-with-python).