The goal we are trying to achieve with these trees is to reward content for being content rather than some vehicle to cryptocurrency by creating an artificial structure that requires communal earning of 'trust' in order to move into a position of power (validation) rather than simply having the fattest pockets.

Okay, the first thing that we need to do is to ban you from ever using single letter variables again. In any context. Anywhere, at any time – you don't get to use them. Okay?

Because any programmer who has ever had to clean up code written by somebody else knows that variables are the means by which we express the unknown given name. Every time you pick a single letter variable, you increase the amount that is unknown not decrease the amount. Bolding variables is fine. Giving subsets subscripted numbers is fine. Single letter variables are an abomination in the eyes of programmers and men.

Like the Holocaust, never again.

Now, onto the process which you describe (and which probably could have been summed up with a decent flowchart).

First, we layout some requirements for a piece of content to be eligible for selection. The first requirement is that any hopeful author needs to vote on an eligible piece of content, E within the tree.

So what you're saying here is that a piece of content is in the eligible pool if the author has explicitly denoted that post as being linked to the Origin – say with an explicit URL. But then you tie in voting as a requirement to be considered for the set, and that makes no sense, because voting is an act of the author and not of the content. In fact, someone could write a response to someone else's post and not posted as a comment but instead as an extended piece to their own feed fully intentionally not voting on the Origin piece because they disagree with it or don't think that the author should be rewarded for it. That doesn't make Content 1 unrelated or unimportant to the theoretical community or topic. Quite the opposite.

So already I have some problems with your selection criteria because they don't make sense.

Also, the growth of this tree is going to be geometric, at worst. At least if we are talking about some sort of automatically generated referentiality. That's not going to be a problem early on, but very soon it's going to be an issue of simply providing too much, too fast to any sort of validator.

But we'll get to that.

One SFE that I could use would involve maximizing the square of the positive voting weight (by the author) on the tree multiplied by the Stake-Based Q-Filter Score squared. The Q-Filter Score is simply a content rating algorithm I invented in prior experimentation and could be replaced with whatever rating equations that tree designers would find appealing.

Ah, we found the unicorn.

Every system of this sort that I've run into from folks who work with blockchains sooner or later, generally sooner, hit the issue of "magic filter." "Magic filter" doesn't mean anything to me, and it doesn't mean anything to anyone else because it is some stirred up recipe that can never be quite revealed upfront or described in a simple way but which the architecture leans on like a Load-Bearing Boss.

In this case, it's even worse because you handwave it away with "or it could be anything else." Poor form, sir. Poor form.

In fact, it's rating algorithms altogether which are very much the hard part of this problem. Possibly even the impossible part of this problem, because it assumes facts not in evidence – that an algorithm can make the best decision about what content to present to a user based on someone else's judgment.

But that's the second part of the problem. What's the first part? It's the idea that the square of the positive voting weight by the author of posts in the set is a way to select what elements from outside the set should be under consideration. Why? How is this a connected idea?

The only pieces of information that we have at that point are that an Author has created Content 1 and indicated in the text that he wishes it to be associated with the Origin post. If you're attempting to maximize the positive voting weight modified by multiplier, any multiplier, all you're doing is prioritizing people who have voted in the past for things in this set – but that doesn't say anything about whether they are good at, capable of, or should be allowed to provide pieces which are put into the set.

Trying to tie too much magic together, here.

But having a hard problem like this to solve isn't the worst problem in the world. It makes correct validation ahead of time less predictable and creates an interesting prediction competition dynamic for any account trying to become the official S.

Why is this useful? This is almost the exact opposite of what you want in a mechanism which exists to provide useful/good/important content on a regular basis. And why would any account try to become the "official S"? Why should I accept anyone's "official" status just because they can predict what some other people are going to vote for?

This is the same problem that we have on the steem blockchain already when it comes to exposing good content. Recapitulating it doesn't make it better.

This prevents gaming of the system via tactical voting or downvoting.

No it doesn't. Not even a little bit. It just means that tactical decision-making happens over a longer period and effects likewise. If anything, it means that tactical voting has a greater impact because there are simply fewer votes in the running. Every vote becomes a tactical vote. Every vote will then exist to game the system.

(The cynic might ask if it is even possible to "game" the system at all because the whole point of engaging with the system is to manipulate the system; that's the expected output, that a vote will make a difference. One might suggest that "voting for things I don't like" is the only way that this system could be perceived to be "gamed.")

The piece of content with the most validation stake is then the next node placed into the tree. It's really that simple. To be honest none of that is really simple at all, but at this point hopefully you're getting a taste of the mechanisms here.

I am getting the feeling that it's hopelessly overcomplicated for the desired result, but I'm starting to get used to that around here.

Essentially these trees are community groomed content playlists that use some blockchain mechanisms in order to confirm and validate relevant and 'somewhat-quality' material for the rest of that community surrounding the tree.

And here's another problem. Why does any of this need blockchain mechanisms?

That's a serious question. Nothing you've described actually needs the blockchain involved and probably shouldn't except as a source of content. Dragging in some sort of connection to the blockchain beyond "here's where content lives" is actively solving the wrong problem.

In fact, imagine this system applied to any other social network content discovery mechanism. Facebook? Twitter? Minds? It doesn't really care about the source, and it really doesn't care if that source lives on the blockchain, and most importantly, it doesn't need a distributed ledger mechanism to work, and implementation is only made harder by suggesting it does.

That's assuming that we accept the methodological premise in the first place. I'm not ready to do that.

The goal we are trying to achieve with these trees is to reward content for being content rather than some vehicle to cryptocurrency by creating an artificial structure that requires communal earning of 'trust' in order to move into a position of power (validation) rather than simply having the fattest pockets.

Here's the last major problem that we have to deal with here:

Nothing about what you've described engages with "trust" by any definition. The core mechanism by which you hope to drive this engine is a prediction market. That has nothing to do with my level of trust in an author or my appreciation of the nature of content on a post. All it has to do is with my ability to predict whether someone else thinks this content belongs in this set. It has nothing to do with what I want or what I believe myself.

That's a magnificent failure. That utterly sidesteps everything that you say you want to achieve in the process. That's essentially broken.

For me, the determining factor of whether I believe some kind of curation league system is likely to work is whether or not it is better than a group of people with a website that takes URLs and the lets them vote on whether that URL should be added to the database of "stuff they like." A skilled programmer could get something like that up and running in an hour. With a couple more hours, they could take input from a Discord group or anything else.

Is this better than something a good programmer could whip up in a few hours, would actually serve the stated purpose, and makes a deliberate connection between community members and content?

Absolutely not.

The last thing we need is one more mysterious black box which essentially maps to who can drop the biggest votes as the determining factor in whether your content gets seen or not. We've already got a few of those. We don't need any more.