Upvoting and staking would become the same thing. Every sat put into a post would go into a pot with the sats from other posts, then get distributed to all stakers at some interval depending on how well the posts do.
I'll have to think on this but this sounds like it might be ripe for abuse.
They are low quality, promoting something, or are off topic. They get the attention of users.
My point being is that you should use this test to then push for economic action. Maybe there's an off-topic sat pool that gets filled up on a per user basis that then devalues their ability to promote or submit posts. Maybe promotion posts require a sat expenditure by the poster to overcome some lower threshold (maybe flagged by users?).
Re: trustless. Other than UX and legal considerations, the biggest unknowns are:
  1. how to structure payouts, because
    • posts come in at irregular intervals
    • upvotes come in at irregular intervals
    • the ranking curve favors newer content over old
  2. how to thwart large economic actors from taking over the page
    • maybe a downvote could solve this, but it's unclear how
    • e.g. a new dog coin comes out and creates a post promoting the coin and puts in 100,000 sats; how do we knock it off the frontpage in a way that costs the poster and rewards the defenders
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