Let's face it, the self proclaimed Steemit police are mostly trolls.

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The platform has a bunch of trolls masquerading as the reward pool police. They are no different than your typical high-school bully. They love to complain about injustices on the platform and pretend they have higher moral fibre than the people they accuse of abuse. The majority of them are just trolls dressed up as police.

Before we talk about them a little more, let's look at some of the issues they have bitched about both presently as well as in the past.

Buying / Selling Votes had unexpected consequences

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A lot of people assumed that vote selling would become the bane of Steem existence and that the price would tumble along with the high moral standard of what Steem Power was "meant" to be used for. The platform is not perfect and probably never will be, but what resulted from the vote selling charade was increased demand for Steem Power in order rake in the above par returns through selling votes.

The consequence of vote selling was originally a detriment to the platform and yet turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Larger investors poured in money to provide bidding and voting bots for a greater return than if earning from curation reward alone.

Ironically, the reward pool police who frequently complain about vote selling were some of the earliest parties to begin offering it. The market quickly grew and now many would consider vote selling a decentralised way of post promotion, a blessing in disguise from the original feelings of this kind of business.

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The REAL Reward pool rape happened before anyone could contribute any content.

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Many of the larger stakeholders have amassed their stake through mining and now like to champion the term "reward pool rape" for those who seemingly abuse the reward pool bypassing the 'proof of brain' mechanism and yet, they forget that over 100 million coins were mined prior to the existence of proof of brain essentially hyper raping the reward pool with little more "work" than running a miner for a little while. This resulted in the widely known imbalance and skewed distribution of wealth we have today.

People tend to give a shit when their stake is earned through hard work and that is indeed the idea of proof of brain, to contribute content and earn your stake, but what happens when there is very little opportunity cost to secure a very large stake, without even contributing content or being interrogated through the proof of brain mechanism? We get a bunch of whales who call the shots and wield their influence often bullying anyone who opposes them. Not giving a shit about the consequences.

The most common type of these whales are those who like to dictate how the reward pool is allocated, and that's all fine and dandy when it's proportionate to the the amount of stake they own but not ok when they dictate how others should allocate the reward pool based on their stake. "Self-voting is a sin" they like to say, but the reality is, they're doing it themselves.

The rules are set in stone. (actually the blockchain)

What are they? Well, we have etiquette but aside from that, the only rules are the ones embedded into the code. Here, if a rule is to be introduced, it needs to be coded into the consensus mechanism. Moral principles aside, without definitive ruling on the matter, those who try to enforce non self-voting (despite doing it themselves) are just being bullies pushing people around.

And that is crux of the problem, the fact that the self proclaimed police of the platforms are often the biggest trolls. The hypocritical accusations of self-voting, reward pool rape, are all cover-ups for their own comparable actions.

As it stands, we have seen how selling votes went from a completely undesirable practice, to one that can be argued to be of some benefit. I believe the designers of the platform knew the value of self voting from the beginning, and thus gave everybody a tickbox to upvote themselves.

Some misunderstandings

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Steem/ SP should be considered fungible not just quantitatively.

I've written about the importance of keeping Steem fungible before, but incase you missed that post, I essentially stressed the importance of SP being valued the same regardless of whether it is earned, or bought. To say that bitcoin which is mined is worth less than bitcoin which is bought is ridiculous, and it is exactly the same situation with Steem. If stakeholders earned their Steem/SP through posting, then it is at an opportunity cost of spending time and effort to do something else which can make them money. Many people choose to buy Bitcoin instead of mining it because they do not have the economies to scale to profitably mine it, and often that works out better. In the case of Steem, people are able to earn their stake because they might have a core competency that allows them to earn it profitably over purchasing it directly. If this were to become a distinction, then the whole value proposition of proof of brain breaks down.

Take away the ability to vote for yourself and..

You take away any reason for anyone to buy SP. It makes less sense for investors to purchase SP, providing liquidity to people who want to sell, and then rewarding content creators in the hopes of raising the value of the network as a whole because the only people who immediately benefit are the content creators. This is exacerbated by the high price of SBD.

The result of this is the investors begin effectively upvoting themselves to make things "fair". In doing so, they become no different from the people they try to police. Thus, the police become the trolls.

There will always be contentious issues on the platform, but the issues which are escalated and then enforced by the rules on the blockchain are the ones that literally govern what we can and cannot do. Up until now, the people who consider themselves police have done very little to show they are anything more than trolls playing good cop bad cop, wielding their influence to empower their own selfish agenda.