When it comes to token valuation and predictions for the future it is highly likely that you'll end up eating your words.
Writing articles with no substance or factual basis is an easy way to earn some rewards in the short term (mostly from people who aren't looking too closely under the hood and are dropping votes at the sight of a token name), but just keep in mind that it's entirely possible that you'll lose support from others because they don't want to be voting on someone who is willing to throw around nonsense.
You don't need to throw together shoddy analysis.
There is far more interesting information that you can share and express your thoughts on for healthy discussion with others, you just need to use your brain a little. Humiliation is not completely off the table though, I may prove that by the end of this post.
The chance of ruffling some feathers, or more aptly "causing a splash", when sharing certain information is not without risk. We're all here to earn tokens for what we share and some may not like any additional scrutiny. Let's see how it plays out.
The information I'm focusing on is regarding Proof Of Brain and its top stakeholders. Since the Proof Of Brain project is centered around actively rewarding content based on its social value, I felt like it was worth looking into.
Currently, the top 5 stakeholders combined hold roughly 166,000 in staked POB, which is over 50% of the current circulating supply. If you are staking your tokens instead of selling them on the market, you should be taking an interest in how the top stakeholders are using their vote.
To check this I visited https://hivestats.io/ and viewed the recent vote operations over the past few days for the top five stakeholders of POB, 
It's fairly easy to do, just enter the account name (with the @) after .io/ and click on 'Operations' in the top box section. In the lower-left corner of the box section, select 'Out' and then choose 'Vote' from the drop-down menu.
This will give you all of the recent outgoing votes made by the accounts with the options to go back and view up to seven days ago.
It is from here that we can start to see the common voting habits of accounts and start to make somewhat vague assessments about important topics such as distribution and automation.
Understandably, POB isn't the only place here on HIVE and people are going to use their votes on a variety of things (including other tribes and various curation trails). With that being said, we can see when checking the accounts mentioned above that some auto voting is regular and the distribution of the token can be questioned.
We currently have a consistent curation process occurring on the platform where
I'm unsure how this is going to evolve as the community grows since manually curating all the posts could become a tall order.
In terms of our other whales, the voting varies from account to account although there is a portion of POB which is directed outside of the tribe; this has its good points and bad points.
It's good to distribute the token far and wide and have the tokens trickle back in for those who want to buy it on the market, while it isn't so great for the people who are wanting to grow their stake solely through posting and commenting on the front-end.
Fewer POB front-end directed whale votes = smaller distribution of tokens to POB front-end content creators.
When the distribution of rewards outside of the community is also paired up with auto voting and no consideration for quality being made, I start to question what kind of message is being sent and if we are heading towards automatic circle jerkery and potential concerns about the governance of the platform in the future (taking the recent mention of a governance bot into account).
I'm throwing out some questions here and there with some more in-depth thinking needed, thinking which I admit I'm not particularly capable of, but I'd really like to hear what thoughts others are having.
Keep your eyes peeled, don't be afraid to throw stuff out there to see what sticks, and remember to look at the things I have shared at the bottom of my posts.
Visit the Ongoing POB Discussion Thread to find recent posts about important POB-related topics.
Don't forget to write your post for this week's POB Word of the Week!
There is 175 POB (liquid) up for grabs. That's almost 70 HIVE at today's current price.
