Ten years ago I and my friend tried to brainstorm cool internet project ideas (being inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage success). My friend came up with something like a vanity dating site where people are ranked by how much they've paid, i.e. to be number one in the list you need to pay more than everybody else.
This wasn't a bad idea by itself, but as a person who loves to generalize, I started asking questions: Why just dating profiles, why not arbitrary posts? And why not allow third parties to pay to promote a post? E.g. fans of some actor or a football club might want to pay to make him #1 in the list. So paying for promotion is like voting.
Then to attract more people the site might pay a part of the money spent on voting back to voters, e.g. as a reward to people who voted early on something which became popular, thus offering an incentive for content discovery.
I've got obsessed with this idea and started researching related concepts: collaborative filtering, recommendation engines, social bookmarking/social news, prediction markets, folksonomies and so on. One thing which I understood well is that doing it right would be really hard. Also note that this was before cryptocurrencies/blockchain became a thing, so I felt like there is a missing piece of a puzzle.
So I didn't pursue the big idea but tried doing something remotely related, and started watching the space closely.
Witcoin was probably the first site which tried to combine cryptocurrencies with collaborative filtering. People had to spend bitcoins to vote, if I remember correctly, and that money was sent as a reward to posters. So this was a step in an interesting direction, but it was rather clumsy. So no wonder it didn't last long.
Then there was ZapChain which is kinda similar to witcoin, reddit's own plan to reward users, datt and yours by Ryan X. Charles... So many different ideas, but none of them looked like a "killer app".
Now I've found STEEM, and it looks really exciting! it seems to get many things right, particularly, that user doesn't have to pay to vote, and yet voting is abuse-proof.
I'd love to analyze STEEM's reward system and economics in detail, as it's very relevant to my academic interests. And, of course, it's great that it's a live system and it's so easy to experience it directly without even installing anything.
There is something cool happening in blockchain/cryptocurrency space every week, but STEEM is truly outstanding.
And some boring facts about myself: I am killerstorm, have been on reddit for 9+ years, learned about Bitcoin in 2010, did the first Bitcoin-related project in 2011, led the colored coins project in 2012, co-authored 2 academic papers about cryptocurrencies, am a CTO of a blockchain tech company for 2 years. AMA.