Sorry dude, I'm not even sure if there is a conversation to be had here. Ned didn't say anything about this change being made to the Trending Page, or to Steem at all... so it just seems like a big, unlikely 'what if' type question.
As you pointed out, I don't think Account-based will improve anything... I do have seen posts on other platforms of people trying to sell 3000 Steem userids... and we know there are nearly a million accounts out there, but only really 70K active daily users... that's a huge gap.
Also... popular doesn't equal good. The fact that Logan Paul is one of YouTube's biggest stars is all the proof we need there.
It really is just a "what if" conversation. I was sort of surprised to hear him say that stake-weight voting hasn't worked out on Steemit, but then only went on to say that account-based voting would be an option for SMTs. It's like.. okay.. and what about Steemit though? lol
I have a feeling that Steemit will be an ever evolving platform that will see many changes over the years. And the Trending page algorithm will most definitely see its share of updates. But as of right now, as you said, nobody is really proposing any solutions. And I don't feel that account-based voting would improve anything anyways.
And yeah, it's insane how many accounts people can create if they have the know how. But Steemit.com is only approving a small number of legit accounts per day. I've heard of people waiting weeks to get approved. I'm happy to hear that they're actually doing something about this in the next update. I'm just wondering if this update will also make it easier for spammers to create more accounts.
Yeah, the accounts going officially through steemit.com are taking weeks (I was greeting newbies for a while and lot of people said they waited a long time), but there are lots of other ways to create accounts... I can literally do one in 3 minutes with @anonsteem.
I am surprised that steemit gets virtually no attention from Steem Inc... even look at the buttons next to the reply button; 'Share on Facebook', 'Share on Twitter' and then just 'logo-reddit'... QA is not real strong here. Like you said in the video, I do think Communities and Hivemind will be a big deal... I'm actually a little bit doubtful on SMTs, I actually can't think of that many business-cases for them that aren't kind of gimmicky... but I'm also super hopeful that I'm totally wrong there because I really want this platform to succeed. I'm honestly really excited that Ned is getting out and about!