On the blockchain my personal bugbear is the curation reward system and flagging....the first encourages vote-gaming and the second encourages reputation-bombing
Exactly these are big problems.
Take these two things out, add a group management system for moderating membership, then create a distributed chat system that functions like a lower latency version of bitmessage.
I don't know if it would definitely work but it is worth a try.
One other additional thing that I think might help (and I know it is controversial) is rank all posts according to the number of votes only and not the payouts - it may even help to hide the payouts as others have suggested.
Obviously the biggest problem with this would be using sybil accounts to upvote your own posts to get higher visibility. If someone could figure out a solution to that fatal flaw it would be fantastic.
This idea of ranking could be added as one of the members of the list 'hot', 'trending', etc. 'most-voted' would be a good name. Because it is vulnerable to sybil attacks, it would not be in the top of the list.
Regarding payouts, I think they should show more information, not less. The estimated current value, plus the curator share/author share, and perhaps even the SP and SBD that could be awarded.
@l0k1 Actually that is a good idea - and using an appropriate name that explains that it is vote based would help.
Perhaps also having some kind of reputation ranking of the votes would be useful - this would need to be based on some kind of percentage based mean. It would need a suitable name - I was thinking "Voter Ranking Index" but that is terrible!
That could work too. I don't think people like hiding information and the other thing is even if it was hidden people could just use a tool to add it back in from the blockchain - I'm sure someone could just create a browser extension to do it. I didn't think of that until now.