I think the idea of a whitelist is quite excellent, though I'll throw in that it will be a lot of work to maintain.

In time, it could become automated - similar to the anti-plagiarism game. People already whitelisted could nominate new people to join and if approved, there could be a link between the 2 users so if there's any naughtiness (via the anti-plagiarism game) in the future, the nominator is also "penalised". Lots of threads of thoughts swirling around my head at the moment of how it could work 🤔

the "decision-maker" will get everything

💪🏼

My thinking is certainly that the new front-end eventually becomes as pure as possible. If people want to abuse the system via UpVu or TipU, then they can. But they won't be doing it on my front-end. This would have the double-bonus that in time, my front-end is recognised as its own entity, built upon Steemit as a Blogging platform and crypto currency but sharing the good - getting a good reputation from search engines and ultimately, boosting the profile of Steemit. Hopefully onboarding many new users that never need to know about the shadier side of what happens here.

The progress I've made feels good. There's a long, long way to go but the direction feels positive and I'm already using my front-end to digest content and linking of to Steemit.com to reply to it 🙂