@yallapapi, @trafalgar & @baah,
OK, let's be realistic ... Social Media is so-called because it's Social. Human beings bond with one another and create preference groups based upon familiarity and loyalty. You ARE NEVER going to overcome that and in my opinion you ought not want to because any minor distortions caused to some Theoretical Objective Payout Model (based purely upon quality) is more than offset by the value of creating intense cohesion between millions of overlapping and inter-locking social networks.
Sociality is the tie that binds.
The Spartans understood this: Despite their intense life-long training and legendary discipline, they still found it necessary to group family members together in a Phalanx to ensure its integrity during battle.
Besides, "my friendship abuses" will be largely negated by "your friendship abuses" and from a systemic point of view, everything largely works out in the end. Admittedly, a dozen fat walleted friends circle-jerking would create non-trivial systemic distortions but they could be handled on a case-by-case basis. (I deal with that in my Series of Reform Articles).
Far more problematic than friendship-based "unearned generosity" are bidbots and multiple-account-self-upvoting as they introduce pernicious knock-on effects ... like murdering curation by re-directing the 85% of SP that's owned by Whales and Orcas into alternative SP-leasing to bidbots, etc.
In the end, we will always have an imperfect system (human beings are imperfect inputs and therefore create, unavoidably, imperfect outputs). But as I tell my daughter, "95% is by definition imperfect ... but it still gets you into Harvard."
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Let's get to 95% before we even contemplate about how to get to 100%.
Quill