What does a vote mean? and how might SMTs help us define them better?

Conflation happens when the identities of two or more concepts sharing some characteristics of one another, seem to be a single identity, and the differences appear to become lost. In logic, it is the practice of treating two distinct concepts as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings as a fusion of distinct subjects tends to obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts.
-Wikipedia

Vote Conflation in Steem

The biggest conflation that arises in Steem seems be the nature of the vote.

I think that votes were originally intended to be used to reward good quality content, and to subsequently act as sign-posts to direct the users of the platform towards this. Over time, votes have been used increasingly to reward work that was carried out for the benefit of the Steem blockchain and ecosystem.

These two uses of votes are arguably both quite legitimate, and seem very similar, but because the work is not always present in the content being voted for, the sign-posting element can become an unwanted side-effect of the votes, rather than an additional benefit. A voter may be happy bringing content to prominence so it can gather further financial reward from Steem holders, but they probably don't particularly want it to end up in the trending pages, because it's just not very interesting for most of the potential audience, and especially those without Steem.

The opposite situation also arises. A voter may wish to draw attention to something that they don't want to financially reward. Unless the author opted to 'Decline Payout', they can't do that directly. They would need to make their own post, and link to the content to bring it to prominence.

Some people copy YouTube videos to Steem as a quick/lazy way to monetise other people's work. When a user likes the content, how often do they actually even check that the video channel is associated with the Steem account? I would say that's rare, partly because of how time-consuming it is. So in up-voting, because the video content is good, the voter is rewarding this act of monetising somebody else's work, as well as sign-posting the good content. It could be argued that this is no bad thing if the original author doesn't have a Steem account, but it's certainly very different from rewarding the creator of good original content.

A flag is generally intended to be used to indicate that you disagree with the pending rewards for a post, but it is also often used as a way of retaliating against an account with which another user has a problem. This again conflates the idea of voting against an account with voting against an individual piece of content. This dynamic will usually also fail to serve the purpose of content discovery.

Self-voting is the case whereby voters justify granting themselves 'a return on their investment' either by directly assigning a share of the reward pool to themselves, or by some more elaborate approach that is less obvious to the community. A vote in this form carries yet another meaning under the same action.

So the seemingly simple vote in Steem currently has many connotations which also evolve over time.

Solving Vote Conflation with SMTs

Once the Steem blockchain is ready for the efficient introduction of these new tokens, I think we will be better placed to resolve this sub-optimal situation. Communities will be able imbue their tokens with their own meanings, and if they wish, remove ambiguity about how they are intended to be used.

The distribution of the new tokens will generally not follow the current Steem distribution, and this means that there will be different whales, dolphins and minnows in each community. It seems possible that in some cases the distribution of tokens might be so equal that such stratification isn't even relevant.

Because in some communities it will be possible to vote on a single post with multiple SMTs, we will be able to declare token X as the reward token, and token Y as the promotion token for example. Then for example, a website could construct a 'trending' page based on the assignment of promotion tokens whilst reserving the reward tokens to pay developers for their work.

If my understanding is correct, this could solve a big problem for Steem by eventually replacing the conflated Steem vote.