Well, i see.
As an analyst once I created a content-rating on a classified selling site. it was a hell of a task, I spend 9 months to did that. At it was a simple target function - a score of selling an item and getting revenue to a company. With tons of information in hands.
I'm not sure if we need to put that many resources there.
But someone could experiment with steemit sidechain attaching a content score to each content and each author.
That's a lot more complicated problem then we even need to think about in this context.
Essentially a web of trust is a sparse relationship matrix. You don't adjust trust to all entities, just those you want to. The results provide an ordering of the content but don't change the content. If there's any innovation required for the process, and given that we were doing this 10 years ago with a lot less resources at hand, it's in resolving the matrix for an individual view.
The big hook is that we need to stop trying to think of things from a global perspective because all that does is encourage trying to "game the system" from the top down. Effectively. That's why we see the undesirable whale and bot behavior that we do. It's incentivized because there is a global view.
My feeling is that a blockchain of any sort is the wrong technology to bring to bear on this. If I'm honest, I have to admit that I'm not really sold on a cryptocoin being a really effective way to reward creators and curators, but since that's the underlying premise that we except when we deliberately engage with Steemit – there you go.
I will say this: somebody needs to put the resources into doing this well and doing it soon, if not Steemit then Busy or someone else who really wants to be a successful social media platform first so that they can reward creators and curators secondly, because if there is no successful social media platform integrated, there's no rewards to hand out. If no one uses the system, nobody gets paid.
This is at least one reasonable approach.