I was just watching a recent interview of with one of the developers of digibyte, and one of their biggest features is multi algo mining. Maybe filtering needs to be multi algo, a mix between upvotes, dollar value, and moderator votes ( as a second layer on a #tag for example )
Although a bit chicken and the egg, i believe users will follow good content. I agree that community moderated communities are essential. I believe SMTs are a crude version of this, but token systems do leave quite a lot of room for creativity in how they are used and built on.
Ah now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Yeah I can't say I know anything about these smart media tokens tbh. Should read up about it.
There is a smt whitepaper. I think it is rather laymans, and really just outlines the skeleton of it. Its worth reading though, and I believe the official steemit blog has some more recent updates on it.
Ah yeah cool beans, thanks you!