Popularity based rewards are all about whether a person's opinion has a particular weighting. This is obviously crucial but it does not necessarily promote quality and originality. Popularity can squeeze out true creativity as people strike a winning formula for persuasion.

To make the reward system more objective and allow those doing something new to make an impression, I think content analysis is a key thing for establishing the value of a post. For example, if I wrote an essay and embedded an old Youtube video then I am probably just using it to emphasize a point, or trying to squeeze that last bit of value from an old post to YouTube. But if it's a new video then there is a good chance it is being presented for the first time on SteemIt, or that it's a genuine new discovery on the part of the poster. I'd say those are worth more than older posts. Likewise a post which links to Youtube videos which have already been linked to in another post probably should have a lower intrinsic value.

I would have thought analysis based reward structures would be an interesting area to pursue in the fields of AI and machine learning.

Anyone else think that analysis of the content, especially the age, should have a considerably weighting towards the value of a piece. That way originality and variety can be rewarded as well as popularity. I think that would increase the quality of the content on SteemIt and prevent it from becoming the next MySpace which basically degenerated into a cluttered mess of self promotion.