1.) Sounds great, but I'd like to see Steemit finally deliver on one of its other big preannouncements before I'll get excited about oracles (communities, HF20, SMTs).

2.) Do you have people looking at auction theory? Google uses second price auctions for pricing its ad-words sales. It seems like this auction mechanism might also be a nice fit for Steemit with stake weighted voting. This would take away the ability to self-vote, unless ratified by another voter, and it would force abusive voters to split their stakes into smaller (less harmful) portions. According to gametheory.net,

The theoretical nicety of second price auctions, first pointed out by William Vickrey, is that bidding one's true value is a dominant strategy.