I've written here before with some first impressions on ways to improve this plattform. That post generated some interesting discussion and feedback. It was awesome to see the Devs behind this plattform taking the time to write thoughtful responses, and get feedback from other users who see the potential of this plattform and are interested in improving it. 

After spending some more weeks here, I'd like to take another shot at providing constructive criticism and write about some problems I've noticed. I'd like to prefce this with a note to the dev-team: You guys are doing an awesome job and I'm not here to bicker or tell you what to do. I hugely appreciate what you're trying to accomplish here and I hope that user feedback like this will help you make your product better. I am also fully aware that criticizing things from the outside is always easy, while building something good is incredibly hard. That being said, let's get to the nasty:

The Tipping Mechanic

The Basic Tipping Structure is Problematic

The main problem I've noticed is the faucet-like structure of tips. As content in the "popular" section is ranked by the amount of money they've been tipped, in theory that amount should reflect how well the post was received by the community. In other words: The highest total tipping amount should be due to either a higher-than-average number of tips or a higher-than-average tipping percentage.

But right now, the base-size of tips is not equal. Your first tip each day will generate a very high amount of tokens, and with each additional tip during that day the amount decreases. So some tips in the morning may literally be worth 5 times as much as tips in the evening. And the only reason for this has nothing to do with the quality of content, but it's only due to the fact that publish0x uses a faucet-like algorithm to determine the base tip size. Your first tip each day, even if it's just 20%, may count way more than a 100% tip given by a different user later in the day. It destroys the only(!) mechanism for quality control that this site currently has.

In other words: If you want your post to have some organic reach on this site, publish it when it's early morning in the US. The current system has two disadvantages that I don't think are intentional: It devalues content that is published in the evenings, and it puts users that live in different time zones at a competetive disadvantage. For what this site is trying to be, the tipping structure is fundamentally broken - At least unless we get alternative tools for content ranking and quality control that work independent of the tipping mechanic.

The 7-minute Waiting Period Makes no Sense

Having users wait between tips really makes no sense if this is meant to be a content-driven plattform. If you want users who come here and stay for 30 minutes reading a bunch of articles, then it makes absolutely no sense to prevent them from tipping multiple articles in a row. This mechanic only make sense when you assume users come here to click through stuff randomly just to earn tokens, like they do on any other faucet. 

The 24-hour Waiting Period is Annoying, But Necessary

The 24-hour period for tipping the same user multiple times is something I can understand - It's a necessary measure to keep people from just spamming hundreds of articles and then go through the list with another account and tip all of them. This is somewhat annoying for when you do find a good writer on here and go through their profile to read more than one of their articles, but I can see why this rule is necessary and I have no idea to improve it. For the 7ish-minute waiting period, however, I see no reason why it couldn't simply be dropped altogether.

Some Suggestions for a (Hopefully) Better Solution

For a content-driven plattform, it would make more sense to implement a waiting period of one minute or so between clicking on an article and being able to tip it. This would incentivize actually reading the articles, and dis-incentivize the mindless clicking of those who use publish0x as a faucet. 
Even better if the timer was stopped (or increased) if the user tries to circumvent this by minimizing the window or switching to another tab.

Another option would be to prevent those users from tipping who scroll all the way to the bottom immediately after clicking on an article. Yes I'm sure this would decrease the user-base initially, but losing the non-reading faucet-only user type would be a good thing for this plattform in the long run. It'd be a bold step, and taking that hit would surely hurt, but I'm sure it would pay off in more ways than one. I'm also pretty confident that the quality of content would instantly increase.