I don't want this to be a long ranty post, and I don't think I need that many words to make these points. I just listened to the tail end of the witness chat on MSP Waves and well...my thumbnail says it all.

PoB doesn't work

Proof of Brain, or the idea that the knowledge of the crowd will organically push the "best" content to the top, doesn't work. Here's a few reasons:

• There is a financial incentive. This pollutes the psychological relationship a user will feel when voting. How each user reacts to this will vary from user to user on a spectrum of, "I don't care at all about the financial incentive, to, I only care about the financial incentive." Most users will be shades of grey between these two extremes. Regardless of where they sit along this spectrum, the macro picture of the crowd is a polluted mess of incentives as the financial one is just the most prominent. Most people think about things like, "How much money does this person already have?, Will this person sell or stake?, Is voting for this person good for Steem?, etc.

PoB will never work.

This is something that can't be separated from the system. It's at the core of the mechanism for Steem. Steem without this wouldn't be Steem anymore.

PoB doesn't need to work.

PoB is not the only way to sort content. As a matter of fact, we're the only ones trying to make this work.

• Algorithmic. What literally all other content platforms use. I've got push back from this saying that then we would have Google/FB. No. The BAD thing about the way that those platforms use their algorithms, is the fact that they use that data with the end goal of finding the ad you will click on. That's the BIG goal. Them pushing relevant content to you is the carrot they dangle to keep you on the site. If you look for example at a site like https://www.artstation.com/. Since the content is very specific and niche, they don't need to appeal to a diverse group of advertisers. So the only purpose of their trending algorithm is to push forward the best content. The ads are all to appeal to the same niche audience so there's no need to use users data to try to feed them relevant ads. It will be up to each business to figure out what works best for them for monetization, but a functioning trending algorithm could be shared across the ecosystem.
  A more functional trending algorithm would take more information into consideration like:

Page Views
Number of Comments
Number of Replies
Number of Votes
Vote Value
Vote Time Windows
Known Bot Votes
Known Trail Votes
Number of Resteems
etc.

• Manual. This of course would have a problem scaling, but we could cross that road when we get to it. Again I will point to Steempeak. The landing page is simply a rotation of curation groups. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than the current situation.

The other main reason I feel PoB doesn't need to work, is because it's just marketing anyway. It's not actually the law in the code. It has to do with how frontends display content. The law of the code is, with x amount of Steempower you have the power to control y amount of the distribution of the reward pool. Period.

This is a better sell anyway!

There is a lot of discussion about what is the value of owning SP. There are many IMO, but this is a BIG one and one that can be sold to the masses. I'm channeling @nonameslefttouse here, but he's right.

Instead of supporting the content you want to consume by constantly spending money. Invest in your ability to be able to not only support that content without spending money, but literally get paid to support it.

Doesn't that sound a LOT BETTER than "Come to STEEM and join us in fighting spam! You might get punished for it, it's not fun, and it probably won't work, but at least you're doing your part in our exercise in futility 😃 "

Chew on it, think about it. Talk about it in the comments. Here's a painting of a sunset to calm you down in case I triggered you.