I actually didn't mean my comment to come off as a negative slight against Whaleshares. I actually like that they tried something different. The jury is still out, I do see many people tipping posts but I also see many just checking in each day to claim their reward and give out about how the system works. 

But it is sort of like whaleshares, right? We can certainly look to them as lessons learned. 

I like the idea of individual pools ... the next thing would be how to distribute it:
- just as staking reward, (no auth/CR), 
- optional tipping (what you mentioned here)
- mandatory tipping in order to get your reward (something like now  but from your rewards)

I think lack of more community features is the number 1 thing. Give communities more features, more abilities to set up their home however they want it to work and look. Then communities will have the ability to also play with rewards and tweak how rewards are distributed so as to work well for the particular community. This needn't necessarily depend on SMTs, a lot of it can be done now, I think. 

Talk to communities and they will tell you what features they need to grow their community and attract new people. Try it and see! They will tell you what they need.

Well, let me explain what I mean and why I think it won't work. First let's outline some facts:

1. Reward distribution system on Hive is unique and can't really be seen elsewhere. Which also makes it unintuitive for any new users. That's why we have learning curve to understand how upvotes/downvotes work. You don't see this anywhere else.
2. It is a brilliant system if the original assumptions took place. Such as, stakeholders/investors would favor long term larger returns instead of short term smaller returns. But our history and stakeholders behavior proved it wrong, most choose/chose short term smaller returns over long term larger returns.
3. Long term larger returns mean price appreciation of Hive because of its use case, user growth, and user-base. Any stakeholder/investor would have higher financial benefits if Hive improved/improves in price rather than inflation, curation, or author rewards. 
4. Our long history has proven stakeholders/investors would prefer short term gains such as lease rent, bid-bots, self-votes, alt-votes, circle-votes, etc that generated Hive/Steem based returns but didn't really translate into price increase on the underlying asset.
5. Price did increase several times in the past following chaotic Bitcoin bull runs, which created an illusion of price increase regardless of the fundamental growth of the platform. Hence, price collapsed ever since. 
6. EIP hard fork did accomplish to fix some of the issues. Bid-bots are gone or changed their ways to more user centric curations. That has been a big improvement. There is tremendous amount of evidence that bid-bots played a huge role in exodus of users and understanding of the platform by the crypto influencers. Many of them cite the bid-bot abuse to the failure of Steem.

Now to your points. 

Global Reward pool is still a unique way of token distribution, that nobody has been able to replicate yet. It creates an illusion of blockchain creating value out of nowhere and rewards talents, authors, and average users. 

Any token distribution system will be games. Hive/Steem has been for years. EIP did brings some hope, and Hive fork even strengthened that hope that promise of decentralized web Is possible. 

Global Reward Distribution due to its mysterious nature kinda works. But it requires stakeholders/investors to put in some work to participate in short term gains such as curations rewards via rewards distribution system. But most larger stakeholders/investors would have much time to participate and hence wouldn't participate in short term gains. However, all stakeholder are still participating in long term larger games that would reflect in appreciation of the underlying asset - Hive. 

Participating in short term gains requires time and effort. That's why we have proof of brain. Those who participate in proof of brain can also accumulate short term curation rewards in addition to potential long term returns as price keeps going up.

***Downvote drama is a myth. It doesn't involve most of the participants of Hive. It only involves tiny minority of people that can be counted by hands.*** I am not saying drama is good or bad. All I am saying is there isn't enough problem there that may cause issues with onboarding or people leaving. Those dramas only involve the loud ones. Most authors go under-rewarded, and they don't even make an issue about it.

***Now to your core solution - Individual Reward Pool*** and why it wouldn't work. 

I appreciate you coming up with an outside the box solution. We do need a solution to improve the system that increases the user-growth. User-growth is the only metric, in my opinion that really matters for a long term success. 

However, your solution won't work and actually would take us backwards. Individual reward pool will lead us to a tremendous amount of abuse. Going back to the game theory, you will see most stakeholders/investors to reserve to passive short term gains rather than long term increase of the value of the underlying asset that is Hive. Everybody will defer to another to deal with the hard and time consuming work of ***proof-of-brain*** to reward authors. 

Why would you want to spend time curating and rewarding authors when you can pocket all the gains yourself. Without downvotes there will be no consequences. Without self-votes, users can easily upvote alt accounts as they wish. Circle-votes will actually look more attractive in this situation. 

Bottomline majority will focus maximizing on short-term gain, not long-term growth of wealth and the platform.

Lastly, Hive primarily being a social platform, emotions will prevail over logic. In those cases, rational financial incentive won't matter at all. This has been proven many many times.

I can keep going and going on this topic, I hope this will suffice.

I see. But we get rid of self upvotes by making the default a self upvote right? So if you do nothing you get your rewards and that's that. 

It definitely is simpler that the complex system we have right now, and probably better. But big changes are always scary.