Part of the standard Steem/HIVE programming is an indoctrination course about how the system "works." Unfortunately, the system does not work as designed. Yes, "consensus" sounds like a good, even reasonable word. It conveys the idea that almost everybody agrees. You see, they had planned on tapping into 'crowd wisdom' to achieve consensus. However, tapping into crowd wisdom is a sort of controlled experiment. And the same crowd will not continually give you its wisdom thousands of times a day for every post. So, even hypothetically speaking, if a new group judged a post each time, they'd all have to have an equal vote for the system to divine any wisdom.

That said, the result is a stake wisdom consensus, and clearly, that's meaningless drivel. Mostly, HIVE would do better off with only upvoting content one likes and subscribing to trails that one enjoys while reserving downvotes to specific use cases such as (spam, scam, plagiarism, and mislabeled-NSFW). Many HIVE-folk got tricked into thinking stake-based consensus is something of merit. However, negative curation carried out by a few bad actors destroys the chance of an intelligent result. The sooner we can collectively shake the idea of "how all this works" and move into why and how it's broken, the better chance we have at repairing & creating a better POB.