@ned
I'll start this off by saying I've read the whole whitepaper but it was more of as skim-through to get the fundamentals.
Now, i think steem is onto something huge here, potential for massive disruption and (hopefully) a paradigm shift for how content is controlled and distributed (centralized vs decentralized)
The issue I have seen arise with nearly all decentralized platforms is the proper moderation of both plagiarism and spam.
I read that the new SMTs will have parameters for how curation rewards are distributed.
"For STEEM itself, curation was originally the quadratic
ICR=, as of the Steem hard fork 19 it is the linear ICR=."
If I understood this correctly, you can effectively implement a system that allows already upvoted comments to gain a considerable advantage over maintaining their top position solely based on the idea that "because x people liked this y people will be more inclined to do so and as such we'll give it an advantage to push relevant content to y users".
I think this model has proven to be a complete failure in regards to comments, at least. You'll notice that comments that usually reach the top of trending posts on facebook (as an example) tend to be comments that
1: were posted early
2: More often than not, rehashed content that can be found pasted in nearly any trending comment section.
Depending on what a website creator chooses, they can effectively create either 1) an inner circle of commentors that profit solely based on the will of the website owner 2) allows users to abuse a system that rewards commenting the same "trending" rehashed content. I think what you'll comer across is having the same comments posted on different posts all trend and make a lot of money for people who effectively put in no work to creating them.
I think steem has a lot of potential but this SMT system has triggered a lot of red alarms in my head for potential abuse. I'll continue reading through the white paper and finding ways to (potentially) exploit the system.
If I misunderstood the way the system works and made an analogy on baseless information, please let me know.