Digg was pretty much a discovery platform, like Reddit at heart. Users submitted links, followers upvoted. The more upvotes you got, the more chance you had to land on the frontpage and thus crash a server in those days.

The Internet being a platform made for, and by, humans, of course, financial opportunities were quickly spotted and the top submitters were often approached with financial incentives. As the issue became more known, and widespread, the requirement to rank became always more complex. Pretty much like Google algo updates.

Often, Digg did annoy its top users because platform updates were created to level the playing field and diminish the weight the top submitters carried with them.

Now I'm pretty sure that a more sophisticated automated, neural even, approach can solve issues like this much better than additional layers of requirements which only make the entry level steeper and can become counter-productive.

Concrete example: I'm rep 54, very often do dedicate lots of time creating decent content, or at least what I think counts as decent quality. But I suck at self-promo. Would this or this have made it through the 24hrs of approval gate, passed Heimdal?

Nope.

I'm not saying those aticles are your cup of tea or that they are good. But who's to judge?

Why wouldn't I then go and publish elsewhere? Yet, while I see potential and love the Steem blockchain, I am working on two projects, one for Steemians and another one to promote all awesome (tech) happening on the Steem blockchain.

Don't make the bareer to entry too high. Many people like spam. TV channels and tabloid rags are the perfect example of this. IMHO an algo that grows the difficulty to earn, as we send more 0s and 1s to the blockchain, is a smarter approach.

Unless elitist is what we want to be, of course.