"Autovote and maximize your curation APR! That is what proof of brain has become..."

I really don't agree. If the only motivation for POB curation was maximizing curation rewards, they'd all be curating HBDfunder comments 100% until their VP was spent, and not one author would receive any encouragement from their upvotes.

"...it turned Hive into a veritable wasteland."

It was not POB that did, it was crap like whales strip mining the DHF, spending 100% of their VP upvoting HBDfunder comments, and myriad other machinations to maximize the rake by whales of the rewards pool. That is why today ~36 whales take ~99% of rewards, and ~1964 of us split the other ~1%. POB didn't do that, and is an effort to put more rewards in the wallets of those of us that aren't whales and post good content. It may not have been able to fix the problem by itself, but it doesn't have a majority of stake, like the ~36 whales do. Because they have most of the stake on the platform they completely control governance. The rest of us have no say in what code the witnesses run. POB can't do that anymore than you or I can.

As to autovotes, I can understand why people automate voting for certain accounts they have found to always post quality content, but sometimes are short of time to manually curate. I don't think people should automate social interactions, so I do not automate any social interactions on Hive. Human society is uniquely valuable, and I think we need to keep it a fundamentally human thing, which automating our interactions does not. We accord bots that same value when we allow automating votes, posts, or anything else. A battery operated boyfriend is not a husband, and does not raise sex toys to the level of humanity, just as allowing automating votes does not raise bots to the level of humanity. What they do instead is degrade humanity to the level of toasters.

Because of this I vehemently disagree we should allow AI posts. The dead internet theory posits that the majority of posts and content on the internet is today bots. Allowing bots to post on Hive will kill Hive. Bots will be able to curate and post using advanced algorithms that will out compete human beings for rewards, and because Hive has been gradually better configured for the whales to extract more rewards, bots will be even better able to do that. But people are running bots on Hive today, and I have been saying this since I realized there were bots here in 2017. No one is going to listen to me, and bots will take over Hive. That's the Dead Hive theory, and I am confident it's factually correct.

PoSV and POB are essentially the same thing. I agree we should be focusing our attention on people interacting socially, and that's also what POB was created to do. That's what social media is supposed to be for. The fact is that until we have some different governance mechanism than pure plutocracy, the ~36 whales that have the majority of stake and capture ~99% of rewards on Hive will continue to have the only voice that matters regarding governance, and to the degree they can automate their rake they will do so, because that decreases the amount of work they have to do to get paid. If they can completely automate everything they do, they will, and then Hive will become nothing but bots competing for tokens. Because Hive will no longer have any utility to people, no one will have any use for the tokens, their value will drop to zero, and everyone will quit playing and move on to something they can make a profit from.

PoSV can't change that because all of us other than the ~36 whales do not have a say in governance, because the ~36 whales have the majority of stake and get to make all governance decisions.

Thanks!