RE: New is so spammy it's impossible to curate "Explore Recent"
Mixed feelings. Adding a small fee would almost certainly help with the spam problem, but it also might limit adoption. People expect social media to be free. (OTOH, getting a handle on spam might even help with adoption, so...)
The problem might be solvable by increasing the resource credits that are needed for posting, or maybe just add filtering to condenser so we can customize our views by ignoring posts from low-reputation authors, low numbers of words, or any other criteria that people might come up with. Another option might be some sort of "freemium" fee, where your first (insert arbitrary number) posts are free, and they become increasingly more expensive after that.
Every time these subjects come up, I always fall back to the position that it needs to be studied by professional economists and/or game-theorists and done carefully. We have a history of "shooting from the hip" and then reversing course a year later.
I guess my position would be: (i) Add filtering capabilities to condenser; (ii) Use the SPS to fund a game-theory/economics study to model it and make a proposal for optimizing blockchain economics (assuming there is community support for it); (iii) use the SPS to let the community vote to approve (or reject) the proposal; (iv) If approved, implement - use the SPS to fund development.
Edited to add: The first two users I checked are both using delegations from Steemit for their posting. Maybe we just need an efficient way to communicate abusive accounts to Steemit so they can quickly remove the delegations.
I love the solution you suggested as for communicating bad accounts,
I agree. Right now, someone is basically using Steemit's own stake to attack the blockchain (I checked 6 more accounts, and they all had 15SP delegations, too). This should be prevented. As I thought about it some more, even that is not as easy as it sounds, though. They'd still have to either (i) automate the delegation removal, which would - in turn - be abused; or (ii) manually verify every report, which could become overwhelming.
The best option might be for the community to actually make use of the downvote mechanism, and then steemit could automatically remove the delegation for any user whose reputation drops below some level. (I might even remember reading that they already have this automation in place, but I'm not sure.)
yep, that is perfect. Once Rep hits... X remove it. @steemit
Maybe they could even encourage people to participate with a "bounty", of sorts. If your downvote triggers a delegation removal, then you'll get an equivalent delegation for a period of N days.