https://steemit.com/peace/@marionbowes/my-quest-for-2019

Alright so I was reading this slice-of-life post about a woman with hoarder parents who inherited all this stuff. It was her job to figure out what to do with all of it. After I finished reading this seemingly wholesome post I had the pleasure of reading the first comment:

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Proof-of-Brain hard at work amirite? LOL, what a slap in the face. It's not hard to make an argument that this comment deserves to be flagged off the platform and the original post deserves to be upvoted enough to make up for the attack. So did I flag? Nope!

COWARD!

Why poke a bear with a stick if you can't kill it?

This is the pervasive attitude on the platform when someone with significantly less stake interprets the unacceptable actions of a powerful stake-holder.

What can I do?

Quite the conundrum.

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Ah, well the answer is simple: come to consensus and form a group with similar feelings. That way the group will have a lot more power than the individuals in it. Easier said than done. No one wants to do the work. Those who are willing to do the work don't necessarily have the programming/social skills to bring it all together. These two abilities don't exactly go hand in hand the vast majority of the time. The odds are good but the goods are odd.

What do I see when I look at @berniesanders?

A talented programmer using his skills to lash out at the world rather than doing something constructive. Someone who derives an immense amount of pleasure from trolling others just as much as he himself has been trolled. All the while justifying his harmful actions and doing metal gymnastics to confirm that value is being brought to the platform.

I can only imagine what high school was like for this guy. I saw this exact same power-tripping mall-cop behavior in MMORPG social hierarchies. The power of these pyramid systems corrupts the mind in an absurdly short period of time without any kinds of checks and balances.

We have no excuse. This is everyone's fault. The Legos of checks and balances exist. The infrastructure/consensus does not.

Even if he's right, he's wrong.

Even if everything out of @berniesanders' mouth was accurate the message has still been corrupted by hate. This kind of behavior will never synergize and bring value to the platform.

Meanwhile, he seems to be engaged in spreading Christmas propaganda to get random people that don't know any better to support him. His very handle on the platform is meant to do the same thing: tap into the subconscious mind to win a popularity contest so that the mental gymnastics can continue.

Trolling for support by capitalizing on the Christmas Spirit. How heartwarming.

What will bring actual value to the platform?

Community Consensus

@kabir88 is creating a Dolphin DAO. I guess it's time to start organizing and seeing if we can come to an agreement. I have a few ideas about how we could proceed. Perhaps these ideas could go somewhere and have real value.

Proof-of-brain

The politics of proof-of-brain have massive support on this platform, but because value is subjective, consensus is difficult. It is my humble opinion that we have to start using the properties of the scientific method in our discovery of POB. Rather than try to prove something has value, we should attempt to prove that something does not have value. This is a much easier task to accomplish, just as it's much more difficult (impossible) to prove something than it is to disprove it using the scientific method.

Conclusion

I have very little stake in individual feuds on the blockchain, but I am very invested in the value of the Steem blockchain. I hope 2019 will be a period of time where my actions speak louder than my words. I'll elaborate on all this more in my next post.