Really glad that some smart people like you come out with this idea!
But I have one small suggestion here: Take away the [UP counts] that the article already gets! 
I said this because people like to judge contents on others' judgment, when you see someone's posts with lots of upvotes, you will probably tend to believe that it's a good article. Same things would happen if you put the 1UP count Icon on the Upvote button, if I see an article with 5UP, I'll probably just vote for it too without even checking it out.
I'm not saying that those content with high UPs don't deserve the upvotes and I agree that they deserve more attention, but with this mechanism, it's still very likely that we will miss valuable content. so personally I prefer a platform that hides all the upvote information so that I can choose my favorite on my own
That's just my thought, anyway I think you guys are doing an amazing job creating this! Good luck with the project
I agree with that. Hiding the amount of UPs given to a specific post untill the voting period has ended would be a lot more fair in my eyes. This incentivizes people to really start searching for content that they find great instead of following the crowd. Great idea!
:>untill the voting period has ended
That's a good idea although there should still be some kind of system such as "views" on youtube which does help you know how popular a particular video is. When I saw popular though I mean popular in the sense of it having been popular to click on and interact with. Maybe it's a video people all hate.
I think all the information that has nothing to do with money should be made explicit and the rewards should be ideally hidden. The whole issue is that the way Steemit decides what is and isn't quality content is based on a factor that has nothing to do with something indicating quality.
Right now of course people are going to be tryjng to "vote farm" to put it the way @flauwy OP does. The value of the post is really the part that's been made to stand out. But the value isn't derived by quality it's instead literally valuable, and which gained valuable by voting strength the quality itself being irrelevant.
Simply put right now trying to farm the reward pool is insentivised, the only to change that short of a serious overhaul of the code is to MORE it more profitable to support quality content. So long as that idea is kept in mind, to make it the most positive and least destructive as possible I think there's a vast amount of potential ways to approach that effectively. I like the 1 UP idea, how well it will work remains to be seen, but anything like this I am glad to be seeing as it's a helleva lot better than those who apparently think aggressive flagging campaigns is the answer, the truth is this is very self destructive and causing more problems than they are helping