This is by far the best post I've ever read explaining Steem/Steemit. It really should be required reading for all new users (and probably old users as well). One comment: you mention above that whales and other big investors have an interest in having a high quality trending page, yet I learned quickly to ignore the Trending, Hot, and Promoted pages, because they authors are just paying to get their content listed there, leading to content that is often quite low in quality. Any ideas on how to amend this? I suspect that the user authority proposal by @scipio might help here. Second, any comments on the economic impact of the 7 day limit on payouts? This means that Steem is not a good place for evergreen content. In turn, that discourages users from posting content with lasting value, which I think is arguably higher quality than content with short term value.
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At the moment content heavily upoted by bots is dominating the trending page. This is certainly not ideal. I believe there are a few reasons for this. Content promoted to just the respective tags trending pages is getting very little attention compared to the main trending page. Therefore to get noticed, users are bidding massive amounts to get on the trending page. Another reason would be because of the amount of Steem delegated to bots. There is less Steem not tied up to bots to organically get content onto the trending page. Also delegating Steem Power to bots offers a higher return in Steem than curation. Delegating is also much less work, this frees up time to get involved in other activities. Delegating to bots appears more attractive. This is only true in the short-run, a platform dominated by bot upvoted posts will stunt the growth of the platform in the long-run. This problem will correct itself when it becomes obvious to large investors that low quality content is a serious problem or when other more profitable investment opportunities becomes available. The latter is more likely in my opinion.
I had a very quick look at the @scipio user authority proposal. I won't pretend I completely understand how it works but it has me curious. I would expect a correlation between upvotes and follows, though many have adopted a follow-for-follow strategy. Resteem services often just follow everyone to build up an artificial following so they can charge for resteeming posts.
Regarding the 7-day payout system, I see both positive and negative.
Since posts can only earn in a 7-day period it encourages people to keep posting and staying interactive with the platform. 7-day payout period also helps move posts off the trending page and allows for new posts to get exposure. 7-day payout period is ideal for media articles and pieces that generally have a short life and attract very little attention after the first few days.
The 7 day period is a negative for content that has a much longer shelf life, which is in fact most of my economics posts. It is does not reward content that could become very popular after several weeks. Many videos on YouTube take weeks or months to go viral. The YouTube payment system would reward that whereas Dtube would not.
It would be very difficult to allow for longer payout periods for some content and not others. Maybe it is possible for the code to allow someone to delay the 7 day period to much later, I expect even this would be very difficult to implement. I think users could try and break their content into parts or create teaser posts to get some attention before posting their master piece. A semi-solution would be to allow users to pin their evergreen content to the top of their own page and if the payout period has exceeded, the Steem community can offer higher upvotes to content that has yet to payout as a way for rewarding the evergreen content.