I'd love to see a page-impressions model. Which pages, which posts (regardless of age) generate the most traffic to the platform? There would be a good market for Steemit Inc to then use their stake to provide votes to that content that captures an external audience, especially now that they've got ads on their front end.

Engagement, however, is a huge thing - but there has to be a way to determine real engagement versus the typical "nice post, deer" that we all remember from the early days. With the change to RCs, that isn't as common, but there's a lot of really hollow comments that don't provoke discussion on a lot of posts.

The sad thing is that they aren't comments like "This post made me so speechless, all I can give you is a vote." They're the sorts of engagement that don't provide any evidence that the post has even been read.

An interesting way, like you said, would be the relationships between accounts. I had an incredible interaction with @mayb on a recent post of mine, and ever since then, by following them, I've uncovered a few other Steemians who engage in a deep, meaningful, and intellectual manner.

I guess that's the sort of people that I'm chasing, and the sort of content that I enjoy.

The fact that this place is somewhere genuine engagement and intellectual satisfaction can sometimes be found makes it feel like a much more mature environment, and I try to reward that wherever I see that happening.