Well in a way it appears to be in the DNA. It is right there in black and white. And I would say something like, "well that was before the trending page looked like an early version of 4chan", but it was just revised in August of 2017.

It really boils down to what the creators want it to be vs. what the people want it to be. Again my biggest complaint was that an ecosystem created for content creators battling against juggernauts like google for adsense pennies while spending hours upon hours of work are no better off aside from a few, because of 300 lines of code running on a Vultr server upvoting junk. So maybe not as drastic as Zipf, but something more linear.

You need numbers to rock and ecosystem like this, and noble causes don't get anywhere if it means adjusting the system that's already working for a 1% in power. They can make it whatever they want it to be.

I really don't know what the answer is aside from changing this layer. I can see you have spend a ton of time thinking about this so perhaps you have an idea, but it would have to be dead simple and easy for the masses to latch onto.

I do know that people are fighting here each and every day because of a much more macro problem. And its passionate, because real lives and real time are now invested. So when someone like this guy has the ability to crush anyone's dreams of making it here because he downvotes anyone critical of him (which he has done), that's a dystopia if I ever saw one. Nothing free about it. Digital version of Genghis Khan.