Hi Steemit,

Here I go thinking again. Our current reputation system isn't too bad, but it does have some flaws. The biggest one is that all you have to do is play nice for a while and get your reputation up above 65 or so, and then you can go rogue and not many will be able to stop you.

Heaven help us if @steemsports goes nuts and starts spamming.

Here is the idea:

Voting on posts/comments would no longer serve to influence the reputation. It would only affect the rewards. The front end interface could still have the option to grey out posts/comments flagged below 0 rewards.

So what does boost reputation then? Followers. If you follow someone, you'd give their reputation a boost equal to your steempower. I don't think this should be an N^2 thing. Just a flat power curve. If a whale follows you, you would get a nice healthy boost to your reputation.

And if you want to flag someone's reputation, you would mute them. Muting an account would subtract from their rep again equal to your steempower. This would be an elegant way of handling it. If you see someone spamming, or plagiarising or otherwise producing bad content you don't like, you just mute them, then you won't have to see any of their content anymore and you'd know that you dinged their reputation as well.

I'm not sure about the exact numbers but I think this could work really well. What do you think? Any flaws?

(I do believe that Dan floated an idea like this before, but I'm not sure if he gave any details.)