RE: Specialization - jump starting new steemit sub-communities and creating insurmountable obstacles for others

if you read the discussion the process is clarified. let us use #trading as a specific example. We would find half a dozen people (regardless of how much SP they have) that are knowledgable about trading to be the specialist curators. The exact method of how they are selected is not finalized and certainly subject to a continuous review as it is quite important.

So let us assume there are N such specialist curators. Now a majority of these curators need to upvote a post with a #trading tag for it to trigger the autowhale upvote.

Please comment on what is proposed, not what you assume is proposed.
I do not see any sybil attack, short of an AI that can pass an ongoing Turing testPeople are involved in the entire process, the only thing automated is tabulating the specialist curator's votes and trigger the autowhale vote. Presumably if a sybil account can fool the community that it is knowledgeable about #trading and it is making votes consistent with such a person, then I claim there is actually no difference between that sybil and a real person, hence there isnt a valid sybil attack as the result is the same.

Please comment on what is proposed, not what you assume is proposed.

I commented on what was proposed in the blog post. I didn't read your comments after you made the blog post.

So let us assume there are N such specialist curators. Now a majority of these curators need to upvote a post with a #trading tag for it to trigger the autowhale upvote.

This seems to be different than what you proposed in the blog post. When you wrote “reputation” in the blog post, it presumably means the reputation system recently implemented which is that number in parenthesis next to our username which is tabulated from vote history not elections.

Okay so now you morphed (or clarified) your proposal to elections of delegates who will control (some portion of) the whales' voting in the instances the majority of them (a quorum) agree.

There are some issues with this:

Election of such delegates is political (introduces politically correct speech enforcement, censorship, one-size-fits-all groupthink).
If the number of tags (quorums) exceeds the number of whales, hypothetically one could argue this increases the degrees-of-freedom in the rankings, but his also presumes that #1 isn't prevalent, e.g. whales don't effectively influence or control the election process.
The individual preferences of curators is bound to the barrier of the majority quorum, so it still isn't a high degree-of-freedom ranking algorithm, i.e. that synergy between spontaneous groupings of like-minded groups will be muted. It seems you are headed towards the politics of Reddit rather than some fundamental breakthough in relevance matching more akin to Googles PageRank and subsequent algorithmic improvements to relevant search.

Radically improving relevance will be a major breakthrough. I don't think your proposal will be that significant of an improvement because it lacks algorithmic power to develop emergent phenomena in relevance and like-mindedness, although it might spread rewards around a little bit better (unless #1 is entirely gamed as it is always is in politics due to the Iron of Political Economics and the power-law distribution of wealth).