Good point. I forgot to address changing user preferences. To adapt to changing user preferences, the set of content instances considered by my proposed algorithm could be a sliding window excluding old content, or probably better would be to weight the older instances less in the computation of the mean for *Dₛₜ*.

So far, I can’t think of any computation of rankings by tags without the clustering by voter like-mindedness, which is any different from the current algorithm; and thus won't stop the optimum voting strategy from being for everyone to vote in a groupthink for the most highly voted content.

Thanks to everyone who appreciated the proposal. We need to spend more time thinking about any vulnerabilities it might introduce. I wanted to get the proposal published as soon as possible. I will be pondering it.

I forgot to quantify that afaics the likely effect of introducing *k* clusters is to lower the maximum rewards by a factor of *k* by spreading the voting power around to *k* times greater granularity (divvying up the groupthink by *k* clusters of like-mindedness). I would need to develop the last section more and write the explicit details for the computation of the monetary rewards.

Multiple cluster membership is what I alluded to in the last paragraph of the last section:

> Also the like-minded distances and clustering algorithm could be applied orthogonally to each hashtag (a.k.a. Tag or category), so that voters can be clustered differently for different hashtags.

You are correct to point out I was vague in the last section, but afaics the rewards should still be according to voting power; thus the relative allocation between clusters and hashtags could remain an orthogonal attribute of the voting power. In other words, the total reward for the blog post’s author would still be based on the sum of the voting power for it, but the rankings would be clustered. However, the voter’s reward should be constrained to the voting power of the clusters he/she is a member of, so that the Nash equilibrium of voting for the posts with the highest rewards is I think removed. The proposed algorithm incentivizes the voting power to divvied up more granularly by providing orthogonal rankings for like-minded clusters of voters and this could be computed orthogonally for each hashtag. I will be pondering more the game theory ramifications of this proposal.

I did actually think of this issue, but I just forgot to write it into the last section. My energy level and focus was tailing off apparently as I composed the end of the document. There were many details I thought of and I may not have written them all down yet. I will as I remember.

The automagic is the algorithm as described.

>>Would Steem fail if every blog post of a lady putting on her makeup is rewarded $26,000?

> I don't know that it would (FWIW, I do not believe that every such post would be so rewarded, only the first that emerged as a hit or others that offered something new).

I realize that opening statement could be interpreted the way you did. Rather I intended it in the context of the article, meaning that given the current optimum voting strategy of each voter maximizing his/her reward by choosing to vote on the posts with the highest $rewards, then there will always be some post that is awarded far too much while so many others are rewarded far too little. Btw, my proposal isn't intended to entirely interfere with the intended psychology effect of quadratic weighting of voting power which the white paper says is intended to motivate blog posters by causing them to incorrectly assess the odds of their likely average reward. Rather my proposal is merely so that the voting power isn’t incorrectly incentivized to vote as a groupthink monolith. I realize some people may be voting their conscience in spite of it not maximizing their curation rewards, but still my proposal benefits them because their conscience will then actually be more highly reflected in the ranking for the cluster that shares the same like-mindedness.

> Look around you. The most commercially successful music is cookie cutter. The most successful TV shows are dumb. Nobody even buys books any more at all (other than maybe romance novels?). One of the top posts at reddit right now (5000 votes) is: "Excluding my mom, what's the worst sex you've ever had?"

My rebuttal to the claim that one-size-fits-all content is what the masses want, is to observe the decline in viewership of non-interactive media (e.g. newspapers and TV) since the Internet. Apparently the masses want to customize their experience with media, while sharing that experience/content with like-minded community (and 5000 people in a like-minded cluster is sufficient socializing and good feeling being a member of a group that shares interests). Meaning I agree and disagree with you, in that yes masses want to share things that many others also like, but they want to prioritize their sharing around their mutual likes, not everything under the sun. And they probably do also want to venture outside their priority interests sometimes to see what is going on outside.  Even my 26 year old filipina gf tells me she doesn't like seeing violent sharings on her Facebook timeline. She wants cutesy and humorous content, e.g. dogs dancing, etc.. She would have absolutely no interest in reading this proposal. But she will partake of an occasional guy who got crushed under a bus (or apparently a pornographic scandal she did not tell me about lol).

Given the millions of users who visit Reddit every day, 5000 up votes seems quite low. This seems to confirm that millions of viewers are being spammed with content they probably aren’t interested in. We might have an opportunity to improve upon Reddit’s ranking algorithm.

> What is successful is what addresses the market as it exists, and that includes a great deal of demand for shallow content and being popular for being popular.

A “Trending for Others” ranking choice could still provide the original unclustered rankings when users want to venture outside their voting preferences. These could even be sparsely interleaved by the UI in the clustered rankings to provide some statistical opportunities for users to morph their voting preferences and not get stuck in a localized groupthink. Yeah we probably need both! Good point.

Note none of the reduces the other main benefit of my proposal which is that curator rewards would be confined to clusters, to remove the incentive for voting in one global groupthink.

> Also, implemention factors are very important. Voting is processed by the consensus code which needs to not only be kept relatively simple but also very high performance. 

The voting is recorded on the blockchain in I presume real-time, but the rewards are only recorded periodically. Note the rankings and rewards can be computed in real-time for the UI independently of the consensus validators. Thus afaics, it is only when the rewards need to be periodically recorded that those computations need to be performed by the consensus validators. Thus it appears the cost can perhaps be amortized over significant periods.

You are right about that but I think if the interface had clearly defined groups like Reddit, which were moderated like Reddit or Facebook, where only people in that group selected as moderators can determine for example to allow a post into that topic, then maybe you can focus the curation per topic.

Right now if I check the basic income topic I can't find anything related to basic income without digging through all sorts of noise.

Is it the intermediate mean for *Dₛₜ*? You think I should cluster directly on the votes? That worry crossed my mind but I hadn't yet had time to delve into the ramifications. I am not familiar with why they are tricky.

Afaics, the problem can not be solved only with filtering the display by tag or grouping without changing the underlying computation of the rewards. Without my proposal, the voters have a mathematical incentive to vote on only the highest payout posts, in order to maximize their own curator rewards. Maybe it is not clear to everyone why I think that is the case. The reason is because I presume the voter has no way to predict which voters will vote on each blog post and thus which blog posts which be optimum for them to vote on to maximize their curator rewards constrained to their cluster. So I presume absent an  a priori strategy to maximize their curator rewards, they will choose to vote honestly according their content quality preferences. Note this aspect of the game theory needs to be pondered carefully.

Additionally, I quote what I wrote in reply to @smooth:

> I realize some people may be voting their conscience in spite of it not maximizing their curation rewards, but still my proposal benefits them because their conscience will then actually be more highly reflected in the ranking for the cluster that shares the same like-mindedness.