From my vantage point, Steem sold its users a false bill of goods. I don't know whether it was intentional, a marketing ploy, failure of imagination, or what exactly happened. However, the blue paper touted two new key features in Steem tokenomics that allegedly made it both "smart" and "social." The features outlined are (1) rewards that incentivize content creation and curation and (2) a voting system that leverages the 'wisdom of the crowd.'

I don't think many can pick fault with the former. However, because the latter is impossible, it makes the platform seem wonky, off-balance, and in many cases, throws merit right out the doggamned window. So we have the code, which is the base level of law here. And this code says: "Welcome to the jungle, do what you will with your stake." The law of the code or jungle, in this case, is 100% amoral and gives zero fucks.

And this ultimately bred conflict between people who wanted to see the platform work as advertised. Those who chose to extract as much as the system allows them to do with their stake. And the animals who psychically feed off of the despair of others after they financially censor their reward potential for the crime of "wrongthink."

So the DEVS started in their behavior modification efforts. They did so by adding a downvote button and encouraging people to use a free daily downvote. I imagine they did this for multiple reasons: (1) To discourage those extracting maximum value with low effort. (2) because they can't control why people use flags anyhow, so they just embraced it and call it a downvote instead. (3) to discourage scams, spams, and plagiarism. (4) a failed attempt to try and force crowd wisdom to work by promoting more curation.

Four is a failed attempt because it doesn't matter how many more people you get to participate in the process. The hard truth of the matter is, if the votes are uneven, you can't successfully tap into the crowd's wisdom. Thus in effect, what we have at HIVE is a veritable meow-meow beans situation. It's a complete and utter shitshow. Suffice it to say--we don't have to stay stagnant. We can help to try and encourage more natural market behavior.

We need to accept past failures and move forward with better ideas. Putting the downvote button back where it was as a flag for spam, scams, and plagiarism would be wise. Also, I liked bashadows ideas about taking reward dispute downvotes out of curation rewards. In this way, genuine quality content creators don't get discouraged or chased off by the animals.

On a more disturbing note, even if we could effectively harness the crowd's wisdom, people are generally dumb and easily manipulated. And nothing shows us this better than the thought experiment done on The Orville S01E07. The episode is entitled 'Majority Rule.' It's on a par with that quote about the two wolves and the sheep deciding what's for dinner.