I believe jl777 is reacting to my criticisms I've been sharing with him about Steem:
Once a new category is established, it would be nice if there was a category fund that can act as a virtual whale for that category. I can think of automated ways where if enough high reputation accounts are upvoting a post in a specific category, the virtual whale upvotes. This automation would put the power in the hands of the dolphins and relieve the whales from having to work 24/7. Also by the whales being less active, their stake is gradually diluted, which helps distribution.
You are apparently not thinking about the game theory of how this can encourage Sybil attacking it for gains. There is a reason the whales are given control with a quadratic weighting, and it is because otherwise all sorts of ways to game the voting system are enabled.
It isn't going to be so easy to fix Steem's voting and ranking algorithms, because it is a fundamental problem.
James and I getting deeper into it:
Please comment on what is proposed, not what you assume is proposed.
I commented on what was proposed in the blog post. I didn't read your comments after you made the blog post.
So let us assume there are N such specialist curators. Now a majority of these curators need to upvote a post with a #trading tag for it to trigger the autowhale upvote.
This seems to be different than what you proposed in the blog post. When you wrote “reputation” in the blog post, it presumably means the reputation system recently implemented which is that number in parenthesis next to our username which is tabulated from vote history not elections.
Okay so now you morphed (or clarified) your proposal to elections of delegates who will control (some portion of) the whales' voting in the instances the majority of them (a quorum) agree.
There are some issues with this:
1. Election of such delegates is political (introduces politically correct speech enforcement, censorship, one-size-fits-all groupthink).
2. If the number of tags (quorums) exceeds the number of whales, hypothetically one could argue this increases the degrees-of-freedom in the rankings, but his also presumes that #1 isn't prevalent, e.g. whales don't effectively influence or control the election process.
3. The individual preferences of curators is bound to the barrier of the majority quorum, so it still isn't a high degree-of-freedom ranking algorithm, i.e. that synergy between spontaneous groupings of like-minded groups will be muted. It seems you are headed towards the politics of Reddit rather than some fundamental breakthough in relevance matching more akin to Googles PageRank and subsequent algorithmic improvements to relevant search.
Radically improving relevance will be a major breakthrough. I don't think your proposal will be that significant of an improvement because it lacks algorithmic power to develop emergent phenomena in relevance and like-mindedness, although it might spread rewards around a little bit better (unless #1 is entirely gamed as it is always is in politics due to the Iron of Political Economics and the power-law distribution of wealth).