RE: My question to @ned for today's livestream. Any good suggestion to my question get's a 10% upvote.
Using large stake to enhance and reward the Steem community by upvotes is a great idea. I think Utopian-io is already doing this a lot, they have pretty clear guidelines on what is eligible, so the bickering is minimal there.
Also, aside from rewarding useful tasks being carried out by the community, another idea is to the following:
Appoint a Great Content Curator, who will be delegated SP for curation and management of curation. This title (and the delegation that comes with it) would be a 12 week position (3 months have 13 weeks, that last week is needed for delegation transfer). He/she could appoint 10 (number tbd) other curators, who will get a smaller SP delegation, who all could appoint 10 other curators with an even smaller SP delegation, and so forth, until the curation group is so big, it can out-compete the bid-bots and we will have the best content trending on Steem.
Clear rules for content curators should be defined, but I guess the different Curation Groups already have a lot of experience here (OCD, Curie and all the others). Not following the rules could result in ending the delegation, decided by the manager of the 10 curators.
Additionally to the curation rewards, in time a system should be developed to rank the quality of the curated posts and a reward should be given to performing well (curating high quality posts, amount of activity from curators, management of the curators you are responsible for, etc). This reward could also be the renewal of the position for a job well-done, but I do think the guy at the top should change every 3 months, with the possibility of retaking that position once per year or so.
We would have a big community voting event going on for recommending curators on all levels during the week of SP delegation transfer.
Well, this idea should be refined, but the idea is to use a big portion of stake to sponsor good curation efforts. I believe in the end, the success of this platform is determined by the extent in which we succeed to capture the best content and the best content creators on the internet into our eco-system.
If we would measure this by the quality of the trending page, I would say there's still room for improvement.
My whole point was that Steem inc should use their SP to reward people that add value to Steem inc (and indirectly the Steem blockchain) to cut costs and not upvote posts and curate content.
They can set bounties for tasks they need doing like Website design (example) so it doesn't cost them resources and time, just voting power/delegation and trust the community to help them out. It can even be outsourced to Utopian for instance. If done well, everyone on the blockchain benefits.