At first, your solution seemed a bit strange, but after giving it a little bit of thought, I think it might be useful.
But my iteration over your idea would be like: let's have different plans for people hosting content on Steemit: one would be "free", but it would limit payout only to the first 30 days (+ the first 24 hours) and the second would be "long term Steem" in which users will pay a monthly / yearly fee (like on a regular hosting service) in order to continue to receive payment for as long as they pay their hosting.
Even from a technical point of view this solution could be easier: keep the short term content in memory, and the long term content, the paid one, separated, possibly in a child blockchain.
A few months ago I was thinking about having several blockchains as sidechains to serve different timescales for content.
Three-blockchain-model could be something like this:
Different blockchains would have different incentive structures. Together they would serve all possible usecases and dominate the global social media usage.
But as long as we are on a one blockchain, maybe the easiest way is to allow users to pay a certain amount of steem or steem dollars to "activate" their old post to be eligible for receiving payouts again. This could be automated so that activation is made when the payout period is ending.
This way users could make money by promoting and resteeming their old articles when they become newsworthy or interesting in some way.
cool stuff :)
This could be done without permission, I suppose? Would require some sort of a payout escrow with a smart contract account acting as a third party (like @steemsports).
I think its a great idea if it can't be gamed somehow.
That's a brilliant idea and would reduce the amount of memory required (separate chains).