Let me take you on a journey to my imagination on how a cloned steemit could look like.
No usernames on posts
This would disable upvoting only your favorite authors, the people on your feed, the whales, or who you think a whale will upvote anyway. It would encourage us reading posts instead of upvoting them based on hot or trending, we would enjoy stories without ever knowing who published them. Creativity would grow severely since we'll no longer rely on getting upvotes from our flocks of followers.
At this moment, I feel like creativity is being limited by the same people filling up the trending pages because of this; A massive amount of followers that will upvote their posts anyway. I'm not an exception on that rule neither. But we need to make room for new, refreshing, creative authors instead of always the same people.
Anonymous transactions
This could be a simple fix by just assigning a new memo for every transaction. People value privacy for a vast number of reasons, going from logical factors to doubtful factors. But many of the users agree that having anonymous transactions is key for any cryptocurrency.
The current code makes this extremely difficult due to the need of a new account creation for every new address (username) you need, but then again, steemit is never designed to be anonymous. In fact, it's hands down one of the most open blockchains ever created.
Limited distribution to a single account
Just like your debit/credit card, the amount of Vests could be limited. If you would limit every account to, let's say, 150MV, this would prevent a fraction of the users being able to control the rest of the community. After reaching the limit, the user needs to create a new account and build that account back up from scratch. This would take time, and in that time, other users can grow as well. A more equal distribution would occur without limiting the self interests of any account holder.
Linear SP powerdown to account balance
The SP powerdown will be linear to your account balance. Meaning, a huge whale could power down less than a regular user. Instead of having the fixed 104 weeks steemit has today, it can extend in time. This would increase market stability, unlike having 250BTC dumps every week, pushing the price extremely low. After all, why would you buy STEEM at 0.50$ today if you know a huge dump is incoming in a couple of days?
Having a linear powerdown rate would eliminate this issue. Let's take the example of a limited account that has 100k SP:
Current situation: Account will powerdown minimum (compound intrest!) 960 STEEM per week during 104 weeks. In a linear version, the account would powerdown only 400 STEEM per week, but over the period of 250 weeks.
This would reduce the amount of sold SP by over 50%, having a positive impact on the markets as seen on this chart
This is only the beginning of how I would imagine it.
I'm sure in a perfect world, there will be much more options to tweak. I think Steemit will eventually implement/adjust some of the things discussed here. Steemit is still young and fresh, only in its beta stage. Steemit is learning how to make its first steps, and everything we do or give feedback about will help them learn to walk before becoming a sprinter.
One thing is for sure, Steem is by far the best blockchain ever build up to date and it's possibilities are virtually endless.