Hey there, thanks so much for your thoughtful comment, @wil.metcalfe! I hope that I was clear enough not to confuse Steem's failed PoB concept with the POB HIVE community, who saw it fit not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even though PoB can never work according to how it got designed, that doesn't mean that we should give up on the idea of proof of brain altogether. And the way I see it, the best way to do that is to encourage people to operate as a regular marketplace.

More specifically, by acting like regular market-goers and upvoting (or purchasing) what we like while ignoring or not purchasing what we don't. By doing this, If the inventory never leaves the shelf, that, in turn, informs the merchant that they need to do better at content creation or, for this analogy, buy better inventory. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever be able to code this with all of the various nuances in the law of the code.

At the very best, if the POB community does have to resort to stake censorship, they'll mostly only have to do it to deal with the antisocial type of characters. And as the antisocial types like to hide and couch their reasons behind the reasonable—these people tend to stick out like a sore thumb because everywhere they go, they're always sporting a pack of matches on them, and their fingertips tend to smell of sulfur dioxide.

I just did a google search, and "The rate of antisocial personality disorder in the general population is [...] between 0.2 and 3.3 percent." If HIVE, in its present state, has 2k active users, that means if we bank on the worst-case scenario, that's only about 66 people to contend with over time. But yeah. I agree that the solution to this kind of thing lay within the realm of the murky middle. And this means if people don't want their precious communities to go the way that HIVE has in popularity, then they're empowered with the toolset that they have to do it differently.

Here is one idea no one will ever sell me on; I don't think we have an abundance of stakeholders who buy the stake for the sole purpose of downvotes. I don't think this idea mathematically jives at all with the number of people with APD in the general population. Granted, I could be overlooking the notion that the internet might be the only "safe space" where APD people can do the APD thing without suffering the types of adverse consequences that in real life would force them to reflect on their behavior. That'd be weird, but also ironical, AF.

Anyways, thanks again so much for your comment, Wil. I will go and check out the links you provided and see what's going on over there. You are always welcome to comment here. I don't think that you are farming comments at all. I think you are a chatty, upbeat, and social individual who can think and is empowered to create. Keep doing all that! HIVE needs a bunch more people just like you! And if you're interacting with people a lot, that's what this place needs! Especially if we are ever to move that Overton window from a dark and dreary landscape towards something a bit more desirable!

You are appreciated, Good Sir, and you have my respect too! 👏