Most of us would agree that the current approach to allocating rewards is a bit shit, where the bid bots and whale whisperers take home almost all of the reward pool, while most actual content creators fight for scraps.
So, what would you suggest is a better way to calculate rewards? You can be vague, or suggest precise formulae.
Snax is going to start rewarding Steem users from 19th May. Their team has been very receptive to feedback thus far, and made several changes as per popular requests. If there are good ideas here, I'm sure they'll tweak their reward algorithm accordingly. But moreover, it's a thought experiment that'll also let Steem developers know what users really want.
Assume that you have access to the Steem blockchain, and you can use any data within it to calculate rewards. It can be something simple like some combination of # of comments on the post, follower count, # of votes, pending rewards; or something radical.
My idea is to look at relationships between accounts, and reward those that generate engagement (comments) from a diverse set of users. Each user gets an engagement score. A user that's known to be engaging with a diverse set of other users will be able to influence the rewards more for whichever post they leave their comments on. If they start abusing the system by collusion or Sybil attacks, their engagement score will drop automatically. I don't have any details about how this can be implemented, but hey, I did say we can be vague!