[Thought for Today] How would you design the payout structure?

Insomnia has its benefits.

Today, way early in the morning (for NL), I ended up eavesdropping on an ongoing conversation between @bacchist & @churdtzu on one of the rocket chat channels. I found it informative and curious, especially if you are at least a little interested in how systems behind what we take for granted  works.

It started with, following the trend of past several days =P, a comment on whales powering down. But it quickly moved to a more interesting point, at least for me. This is not so much a rant about how sometimes certain type of content gets payed a lot while some very well written, insightful posts don't get a dime. It's more about 'why' it might be resulting that way more often than not. How the vote-power & payout system worked at this point, and how it seemed to favor the already highly rewarded ones. The intended psychology and the design of it for the user. It's not a detailed talk, it's just two people exchanging some thoughts and thus a very very easy read and I believe is enough to make one curious.

I'm no dev, but I'm sure that white-paper and the ongoing tweaks that are applied to steemit are not done or taken lightly by the designers of this complex system. Still tho, I found myself agreeing with some of the sentiments below. I've asked permission from them both to share this with the rest of the community and hopefully peak a few more peoples interests on the topic. "Without making it sensationalist" just leaving it as an open question. 

What are the benefits of the current design, what are the cons, in short and long term?

If you were a dev, how would you design the payout structure?

I hope it will spark a discussion or at least reach a few more people, that might not be following the chat platform.

Cheers!