great concerns Calamus! I'm with you. One question though, how exactly would one "penalize for curating improperly"...seems like it would be a tricky thing to implement. If you upvote someone that doesn't reach a certain threshold of additional upvotes, then it's judged to be 'bad content'?

If upvotes are the mechanism through which we can algorithmically judge the 'quality' of content, how does one measure good or bad quality in any other way? Seems like a good problem to me. Also... I think there's a real question at hand here...If there is value in upvotes, how can we possibly prevent people from acting as dollar maximizers? I'm not sure we can. Ultimately, we all have some aspect of power from our own votes and words...