Alternate Steem Powers - Evolution of Steem - An Idea for Supporting Multiple Independent Steem Based Communities

If I understand the direction that @dantheman sees Steem going, eventually one day the Steem currency will be supporting all types of different ecosystems, each independently using the Steem currency + blockchain, but doing their own things. They will be similar to Steemit - but different.

There could be a music platform where people upvote their favorite songs (like Pandora). There could be a community where people get tech-support help from experts (like Stack Overflow). There could be a picture sharing site (like Instagram). There are hundreds more that could spring up too - all using the Steem blockchain, currency, and voting/reward system as their foundation.

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Already we have new platforms like this springing up. Yesterday, I saw this post for a new platform called "Squeek.io". This is going to be similar to Twitter, except based on the Steem currency and blockchain. Awesome! (I love the name by the way!!)

One thing we need to think about - with all of these sites sharing in the same Steem Power vesting, voting, and rewards, won't they be competing with each other for the distribution of rewards?

If a founder of a new platform decides that they want to invest $5,000,000 in Steem Power in order to give their community weight for the distribution of rewards - that one user will need to be very actively involved in the voting of their platform, otherwise none of their users would get any content rewards. Also, none of the other users in their community would have any voting weight.

How would the creator be able to get their users involved in voting, if none of the could have any sway without investing tens of thousands of dollars?

What happens when that creator account decides not to upvote on their platform for a day? None of the users in their community would receive any post rewards that day, because all the rewards would be allocated to the platforms where the heavily vested SP users were voting.

In order to solve this problem, Steem may need to start supporting "Alternate Steem Powers" (ASPs). Think of it this way - Steem (the underlying currency) could be vested into "Regular Steem Power", or into any other "Alternate Steem Power". Each ASP would receive vesting/content/curation rewards proportional to the ASP's overall vesting in Steem.

This would allow mini-ecosystems to evolve, because users in these communities could post/curate/vote with their small ASP weight (compared to the entire Steem vesting pool), and still be rewarded out of the large pool of Steem that gets distributed to the ASP group.

This could even allow mini-ecosystems to form within Steemit.com itself.

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Think of communities like "steemitphotochallenge" where everyone is participating in a niche interest group. You could have a 'SPCSP' created within Steemit, with $10,000,000 worth of Steem - and every day the people participating in the steemitphotochallenge community would be getting rewarded out of a $10,000,000 vesting pool (even if no "Steem Power" whales paid attention to the community that day).

The ASPs could still be tied back to 'Regular Steem Power' too, by doing a 80/20 split of the new Steem that gets generated within the ASP back into regular SP. This would allow the original SP to remain an attractive investment, even with lots of new ASPs popping up.

The idea of ASPs would also allow large existing platforms (like Facebook) to more easily integrate the Steem blockchain based voting into their platforms, by creating their own ASPs.

There are three main downsides that I can think of:
-It would be complicated to implement
-It could devalue 'Regular Steem Power'
-There could be new forms of gaming / market manipulation

It is a complex problem to solve, but it's something to think about..