Hi @jl777, I agree totally with what you are proposing. I am actually writing a series on using the principles of graph theory to expand the Steemit network. The key idea is, in fact, that we need to create new spokes of the network that become specialist hubs, rather than simply expanding the central core.
The danger is that Steemit gets stuck in a local minima: a Steemit-dominated front page, with writers writing stories targeted at getting on a Steemit-dominated front page. Avoiding that requires some long-term thinking, and perhaps introducing bounties for certain topics, scaling vote weights down for large holders and popular tags etc. It's a very hard, and interesting, problem but for anyone who wants Steemit to pull in and retain users from outside the crypto bubble, it will need to be addressed.
my conclusion exactly.
But it wont require much changes, mostly an overlay that organizes competent dolphins in each category. Once that is in place, then a bot can do an MofN aggregation of the human decision and then release the allocated SP for that category. We have #trading as the first identified category that fits this strategy and @wingz as lead.
So the process is to identify a category, find a specific person to lead it, which means to find other curators with expertise in that category. Once this is in place, then at first whales to manually upvote the identified content, but that can easily be automated with a bot,so the only internals change would be to allocate the unused steemit account's voting power, which has plenty to fund dozens of speciality categories
eventually the witness system can be used for the category curators and the entire process can be automated, even new category creation so that it remains decentralized
That sounds good. I don't have the voting power, but to point people in the right direction, I'd definitely be willing to do some manual curation around #fiction and #writing (the things I do for fun) and the more technical topics (that I do for work). Those haven't really settled around a hashtag yet - but I guess it would be things like #mathematics #programming etc.
since this is purely volunteer effort now, our resources are limited. #trading is the first test category we are doing this with, so any help you can to recruit more people to get #trading established would be great. thanks!
I think politics will also have overlap with existing user base everyone has an opinion and we can target readers of politico thehill dailykos 538 red state power line hotair etc. some insiders will likely post here where they make money rather than leak to the other sites