RE: For a better Steem, remove the Steem reward pool
I don't actually agree that the current rewards system has failed, but even so, there is always room for improvement. So it's not really worth debate on that point.
I have long wondered what would happen if post payout were modeled after something like a second price auction.
Generalized Second-Price Auction (wikipedia)
The generalized second-price auction (GSP) is a non-truthful auction mechanism for multiple items. Each bidder places a bid. The highest bidder gets the first slot, the second-highest, the second slot and so on, but the highest bidder pays the price bid by the second-highest bidder, the second-highest pays the price bid by the third-highest, and so on. First conceived as a natural extension of the Vickrey auction, it conserves some of the desirable properties of the Vickrey auction. It is used mainly in the context of keyword auctions, where sponsored search slots are sold on an auction basis. The first analyses of GSP are in the economics literature by Edelman, Ostrovsky, and Schwarz[1] and by Varian.[2] It is employed by Google's AdWords technology.
Second Price Auction (gametheory.net)
The theoretical nicety of second price auctions, first pointed out by William Vickrey, is that bidding one's true value is a dominant strategy.
I'm not sure if SMTs will let developers play with different payout schemes, but if so, I'm hoping someone will explore that avenue (and perhaps other possibilities arising out of auction theory that I'm unaware of).
I'm not sure game theory scales up to societal levels.
SMTs will definitely have account-based voting, which Ned has been hyping of late. I don't know the details, or the granularity available though. Either way, any SMT can build upon the code to code in their own customizations.
Most of it doesn't; Evolutionary Game Theory might, but I don't think the original game-theoretical thinking that went into Steemit goes far beyond the one-shot prisoner's dilemma. Not saying that I would be able to come up with Something That Works based on Evolutionary Game Theory, but still.
@liberosist:
Not sure how far it scales, but if auction theory applies for a massive use case like Google's AdWords (see the wikipedia excerpt in my earlier comment), I guess it should have something to say about a platform the size of Steemit.
I agree with this (@ocrdu):
Although, to be fair, they did incorporate the idea of a reverse auction into the early voting penalty, so it eventually extended slightly beyond the basic prisoner's dilemma, and into auction theory.
Auction theory will most certainly scale up in size and numbers, but I doubt it has the necessary width and applicability when it comes to modelling group or societal behaviour that is more complex than an auction. What I mean is: I doubt it can model Steemit well enough to do predictions. I hope I'm wrong though, as it could help if it would.