With 
Idea #1
Does anyone actually reading and voting on this believe this post is worth over $2500? Keep in mind, most of that value was added by Dan himself and his co-worker @val-a. Curious to hear what you all think? Does this deserve to be downvoted?
This got me thinking of something happening on the site: over-voting. Currently, the best way to get people to read something important is to push it to the top of trending. In doing so, some authors get disproportional rewards relative to the quality of their work. (I understand this valuation process is subjective, but work with me here)
Here's what I proposed to Bernie:
Maybe there could be a different "home" feed, instead of trending, with some sort of google page rank algorithm, as @dantheman had previously touched on. This home feed would not display a vote option or the pending money-earned, until you click the link to view the post. This way, important and popular posts could be front and center, without needing to be the top earning post, and without affecting the site's current voting economics. Meanwhile, the trending (monetarily) feed could still be in the pull down, as is.
Just a thought to combat over-voting instead of leaving influential curators in the position to consider planting a flag to restore order, in a sense.
I wanted to draw it out, since I like playing around with my mad MS Paint skillz:
If possible, an algorithm (different than the vote-sharing model Dan theorized) figures out what's appropriate for the home feed, not up-votes. If not possible, then maybe the 30 votes that we get for witnesses could go specifically to the best home feed curators, instead. Of course, then we would need to find another way to delegate witnesses, so I'm not sure if that would work.
Up-voting would still be there, but you would need to enter the post from the home feed to vote. The trending feed would still be there in the drop down, as well, and would look exactly the same, with the money and up-votes under the posts.
A bonus side effect of hiding the money on the home feed, is decreasing the "jealousy feels" that seem to rise up in some people. They wouldn't log in and immediately get mad that someone made $5000 for something they view as over-valued. (I know some people feel this way, because I've talked with them in real life about it. And, yes, I realize that this is more of a problem on their end, but the less "obstacles" to new users the better, in my opinion)
Idea #2
What if our rewards were proportional to our Steem Power, irrespective of the timing of my vote or the popularity of the content I vote on? If I have 10,000 SP then let's say that means I get .01 SP when I vote, so long as I have 100% voting power. Neither the popularity of the post nor the timing of my vote would matter, as I'd always get the same reward every time I voted at full strength. If the post (or even my vote, as Dan theorized) gets flagged, my reward goes down proportionally to the Steem Power of the person flagging, as well as anyone else who up-voted.
SP holders would still have a good reason to curate, as their average rewards would end up pretty much the same, as far as I can tell. They may dip a little because they were really good at finding upcoming gems, but I think, on average, we wouldn't see much difference.
Now, there would be no incentive to up-vote posts just because they will become popular. You still could, but there would be no financial reason to vote that way. It turns the process of voting into users simply showing the things they like and feel add value, which I believe is the exact behavior we are looking for on this site.
I feel people shouldn't be flocking to up-vote a post just because a whale voted, or just because they know that author can crank out $1000 posts. It creates a dynamic that diverts people away from what I consider "good" voting behavior that would otherwise be beneficial to the site in the long run.
Another benefit to this is that it would dissipate votes a little more to smaller users. This would allow more people to get rewarded for their work, as it wouldn't be a constant hunt for the next big post by a popular blogger, where the "little guys" constantly get overlooked. Anyone and everyone could get noticed, even if they aren't popular creators on the platform. This would entice these users to continue coming back to Steemit and I believe we would see a lot more active accounts as a result.
So what do you all think? Does this make sense? Am I completely off base about something? It wouldn't surprise me, as I am not an expert. I did search a bit to see if voting was discussed this way and didn't find anyone bringing it up. Someone has likely thought of my home page idea, but I like messing around with MS paint and wanted to roll with this little brainstorm. And who knows, maybe I'm on to something with one of these ideas. Just thought it was worth sharing :)
