Build a system where...
Articles cannot be downvoted by others, regardless of reputation. Allow only upvoting of articles and comments. That way the articles with the most votes will truly be the best articles. As it now stands with Steemit, there is no correlation between an article's quality and the net votes it receives since downvoting by high-reputation members carry such a huge weight.
All votes carry equal weight. Votes of a higher-reputation members should not carry more weight than those of lower-reputation, simply because reputations on Steemit are bought rather than earned. That is a major flaw with the Steemit platform.
Curator payouts are equally divided among all curators, and not simply favor those with higher reputations and more steem power.
Porn is completely from the site, as does Google, Facebook, Instagram, Seeking Alpha, and all other reputable platforms. Allowing porn degrades any platform to the point where most members will simply abandon it. It's just a matter of time.
...there are many others I could give, but I think you can get the point form those. Steemit is simply not an enjoyable or desirable place to be, and will likely not survive much longer regardless of the success of the Steem blockchain or Steem coins.
What enforcement mechanism would you propose?
How is flagging superior to downvoting?
I've had pages get flagged by competitors for the sole purpose of sabotaging me.
Even big yo.utubers complain about getting demonetized (even temporarily can be a big deal if it keeps you off the trending and recommended lists) by bogus flags.
There it is. Where can we find one of these mythical "neutral bodies"?
Articles cannot be downvoted by others, regardless of reputation (sounds good but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material).
All votes carry equal weight (this should be a no-brainer, but we would need some sort of automated "proof-of-brain" and protection against people controlling hoards of sock-puppets).
Curator payouts are equally divided among all curators (lowering the minimum payout to 0.001 steem and removing the "timing" bonus would fix this).
Good ideas!
"but we need some enforcement mechanism to remove scams and illicit material"
Who would make such a decision? And how would you mitigate the damage potential of a "rogue mod"?
I heard an interview with a fa.cebuk flag-checker recently, they were paid a fractional wage and worked from the Philippines. They said that they were so overworked and borderline traumatized from viewing all the horrendous flagged content, and under pressure to review 1000 flags a day, that they ended up just clicking "denied" repeatedly on all their cases.
Yeah, but that New Zealand shooter, "subscribe to pootiepie" video took them several days to clear out... AND they're literally rollin' in cash-money-dollars.
Yo.utube BY ITSELF is raking in more profit than either VIACOM or COMCAST.
What are your "clearly defined violations"?
4 minute story about fa.cebook moderators
You're going to need to be slightly more specific.
Are you familiar with the difficulty of defining pr0n?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus
This is a non-trivial problem.
Many users have access to hundreds of machines with unique ips and have the scripting resources to automate nearly undetectable sock-puppets.
The one thing they can't fake is steem. So, under the current system, they can't amplify their vote with multiple accounts (well, except for the free steem delegation and (25) rep that each new account automatically gets, which is sort of a problem of its own).
Some people have access to hundreds of computers with unique ips and unique hard-drive serial numbers.
Yes, you can reduce the number of accounts operating from one computer (hypothetically anyway), but that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm pretty sure they're not using their massive army of zombie machines EXCLUSIVELY for steem farming. They could probably do any number of things simultaneously while maintaining reasonable efficiency.