its a complicated issue, off the top of my head I do not have a solution for fixing the flaws of POB. But I believe it is important for everyone to admit that POB in its current design does not work so that we can fix it.

If people are afraid to admit this in fear of STEEM price going down in the short term, it could hurt Steem in the long term. We need to be brutally honest about the network's flaws so that we can discuss it and fix it.

One possible solution is removing POB from STEEM and keeping it only in SMTs with incredible flexibility baked into the protocol. If SMTs can try many different forms of POB, we might discover successful forms of it.

For example, people argue that having POB without downvotes does not work, and then they point out whaleshares. But it might not be that whaleshares is a failure due to downvotes, the project might have failed simply because too few people believed in it or it simply didn't offer anything Steem did not offer already.

So, SMTs can allow many projects to experiment with their own versions of POB, as long as we provide great flexibility in their POB features. And the POB designs that work best will shine through over time.