Users with priority mode turned on, like priority mode.

Users without the power badge, don’t like priority mode and want more visibility to users with priority mode turned on.

Making power badge more permissive, increases spam. Makes everyone unhappy (except the spammers)

Solve for X.

Power badge has flaws, but haven't seen a concrete proposal for a deterministic alternative to the power badge.

Most suggestions for improvement are: "sounds like a hard problem, but whatever system you put in place should give me the power badge." :)

Make tiers of Power Badges. Right now it's day and night. PBs interact only with PBs. Everyone else might just be a bot, and it's cumbersome to check, so to hell with them - some might think.

By having tiers you'll show the advancement to a regular user and make them interact more with each other.

Make sure to give up when it gets really hard

Exactly! You'd be basically controlling your own exposure! And we can keep the numbers of the "true" PBs so they can continue being special. By gamifying the system - providing a feedback on the progress - you incentivize users to keep interacting. Imagine if you'd only have Bronze and Grandmaster in a competitive game

The better option would be providing the choice to filter out below a configurable tier, like a filter system in an e-mail client.

So the ones who are okay with talking to low ranks could either turn the priority mode off completely or configure it to include the badges from the lowest to highest.

How is that different than now? Users who want priority mode on won't want to see anything below the top tier?

Founder /hodlhq ⬗ Host /rtfkt /fcny /warped ⬗ RTFKT Creator - /clonexnyc ⬗ Phygital Hoarder ⬗ Degenerate Gamer ⬗ icebreaker.xyz/hodlceo

Thank you so much! 🙏 
4-5k power badges makes sense when you have 50k active users or so.
But we are over 500k and the small ranks would like to stand out from the bot crowd so at least people we reply to know who we are. And the top rankers don't get to lose their uniqueness!