True crowd wisdom, when correctly tapped into, provides highly accurate results. Something like this should never get confused with half-hearted attempts that create an illusion of crowd wisdom. So, let's say we wanted to make it work on HIVE.

• (1.) Every vote would need to be worth the same (we can't do this because of dPoS). dPoS says vote weight is unequal for everyone.

• (2.) Only verified unique individuals could vote (we can't do this because there is no KYC). It means one person can control a swarm of sock puppet accounts.

• (3.) Voting trails would have to get excluded.

• (4.) Each post would have to get read and considered by the same number of people before the vote occurs.

Essentially, all of these points show us why crowd wisdom cannot get harnessed on this platform. However, we still have people who claim that the system is working as designed. The design was a failure because it did not fulfill the intentions of the designers. So even though it's failing as designed--I don't think the designers wanted it to fail.

In response to the design fail, Steem decided to turn the Flag button with limited use scenarios into a downvote button and then encouraged people to downvote liberally. They did this as an attempt to force the "crowd wisdom" mechanic into working order. The problem remains, and that design change only served to make things worse.

The number of active users on this platform is at an all-time low of 2k. And this is in large part due to the STEEM/HIVE split. The purported crowd wisdom mechanic is about as useless as tits on a boar. It's ornamental at best, like having a replica flux capacitor in your honda civic. It might look cool and light up, but it's not going to do anything.

And this is why it would be wise for HIVE to fall back to flags with promoted standards for flagging. And none of the "promoted" standards ought to be about so-called "overrewarded posts." I'll give you a prime example of why; Take azircon and acidyo as an example. These are two very powerful stakeholders. Many times they'll see a post that's got over 100 HIVE in rewards, and they'll cut it in half because it's "over-rewarded."

PARAGRAPH EDITED: You'll notice that both of these users have published posts that will earn well over 100 HIVE. Generally speaking, no smaller accounts dare downvote large stakeholder posts for being over-rewarded, and this is because regardless of who you downvote, the potential for downvote retaliation is real. However, it goes even deeper than that. These users are more likely not to get downvoted by their peers; This is because much of this platform is about powerplays, and therefore it's wise not to make enemies.

Essentially, going back to flags for spam, scams, and plagiarism isn't a bad idea. There should be a strong promotion of upvoting content you like, ignoring the content you don't, and flagging scams, spam, and plagiarism. This model lines up better with the natural marketplace. People buy the stuff they want and ignore what they don't want. The downvoting for reward disagreement is on a par with Molotov cocktails.

Downvoting "over-rewarded" posts without the use of crowd wisdom (something we can't do) is akin to bloodletting to prevent or cure disease (in that it doesn't work). With only 2K active users, instead of doing witch hunts and spiking posts down because we think they are over-rewarded, we ought to be seeking out under-rewarded articles. Providing we take those and vault them up to compete; Then we will hemorrhage less of our active user base, and the platform will have a fighting chance.

Thanks for writing about this topic and tagging me. It's good to get your take on the matter. HIVE will continue to do what it does--and whether these things are of merit, it shall reap accordingly to the will of the marketplace. I.E., If there's any market left for it after all is said and done. I'd like to see this place get good. I think it has potential. What I don't know is whether or not its potential will get realized.