I have to admit, the optimism is hard to sustain in the face of so much destructive behavior in the ecosystem, but the potential is there. There's a lot to build on if we can find the right leadership and collaboration.

Oh, and by the way, I was pleased that thoth.test found an old post of mine.

I had noticed that @thoth.test picked your post out, and I was also glad to see it. Overall, I'm fairly happy with most of the authors and articles that he's selecting these days.

I am convinced that fair distribution of rewards is one of the most important factors for success. This means, for example, that spam or useless stuff gets nothing and the rewards actually go to active users.

Agreed. I have always thought that overvalued posts are just harmful as undervalued posts. They're two sides of the same coin. This is why I think something like Thoth can eventually have a solid impact.

Sometime, I'm going to have to sit down and actually try to work out the math, but it's clear that there's some ratio of owned SP vs. delegated SP where the Thoth operator can afford to pay delegators more than the existing voting services (especially if Thoth selects posts that are interesting enough to draw additional/organic upvotes).

Plus, the potential for lifetime rewards means that an author has to think about rewards over the long term, so it doesn't make as much sense to go for the big burst on day 1 just to be ignored forever after that. Maybe my post doesn't draw $100 today, but maybe it earns $5 per month for the next 10 years (assuming widespread adoption of Thoth or something like it).

What would the reward structure look like if it had been created under the “veil of ignorance”? According to Rawls, the focus would have been on maximizing the minimum.

If you think deeply about Thoth's mechanism, there are a lot of dynamics in play that can help with that sort of thing. For example, even posts that don't qualify now because an author is new might qualify in a month or two if the author stays around and builds their follower network. I have come across a number of interesting nuances like that while working on the project.