All right, real talk. I'm going to give it to you straight.

Stop caring about vote buying. Stop caring about buying votes for yourself. Stop caring about other people buying votes. In fact, stop caring about the entire vote economy. I'll tell you why.

They don't matter.

Or at least they don't matter at any scale that you are I are likely to interact at. The people who are getting serious, heavy rewards as a side effect of vote buying (or vote selling)? People who have sunk a lot of time and effort and what looks like an absolute load of real money into becoming bot masters. They command or are at the command of swarms of bots, each of which has their own accounts, probably some delegated SP, and which collectively command far more ability to leverage voting power than any real person.

And none of them care about content.

None of them. That's not how it works. That's not what they care about.

Philosophically, it's always someone else's vote. You control what you vote for, but when you try to control what someone else votes for – you are intervening in their choices, in their free will, and you are tacitly acknowledging that you want them, not allow them but actively want them, to intervene in yours. As a result, caring about votes in the sense of caring about how someone else votes or the mechanism by which someone else votes or the target of someone else's votes is ultimately self-defeating and systemically destructive.

I don't care what someone does with their votes, and that has to include selling their vote if that's what they want to do. It's their SP and it's their vote, not mine.

So what does that mean in regards to Reputation? Reputation is directly affected by votes.

It means what we all know – Reputation doesn't matter as long as your Reputation isn't so far negative that your content doesn't appear on the blockchain through most of the lenses, your Reputation doesn't say anything aside from the fact that you've been around for long enough to know what you're talking about and know how to use the system.

We all know that. We all know that we don't pick what content to read based on the Reputation of the person writing it. It doesn't matter. We might as well just be honest and say out loud to everyone around and to ourselves that it doesn't matter. Because it doesn't.

We don't pick what things to vote up based on the Reputation of the creator. We just don't. It doesn't matter.

So since it doesn't matter, at least in a positive sense, the only thing that matters is keeping it out of the basement. And that has nothing to do with vote buying. Nothing.

It might have something to do with some people ending up with a concerted effort to down vote them for reasons which aren't legitimate in the greater sense, which are deliberately just intended to harass and coerce them, to keep them from being able to interact with everyone else, but that's a different issue. That's a much bigger and more complicated issue and goes well beyond vote buying and into how we can have any kind of governance, centralized or not, in a publicly accessible global social media network.

I'm willing to have that discussion, but it's a lot bigger than anything having to do with blockchains, despite what people might think. It's a big question and it's a big problem, and people don't think about it enough.

It is never going to be possible, mechanically, to track and programmatically thwart the interactions of accounts on social media networks who communicate out of band. We can track suppositional behavior. We can try and define behavior which might indicate some sort of collusion – but we have to be very careful that we are not actually observing and judging perfectly reasonable community-behavior which looks exactly like collusive behavior. If we must err, it's sensible to err on the side of believing that it is a community because community and communities are what we want.

Or to paraphrase one of the leading lights of modern law enforcement, "better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be jailed."

Mainly because we recognize that that one innocent man might be us.

So what is it reasonable and rational to care about if votes, or more specifically what other people do with their votes, is not something that's reasonable to care about?

The one thing that we never talk about in the one thing that actually matters: content.

You'll notice we haven't talked about the creation of content, we haven't talked about the discovery of content, we haven't talked about the fact that communities are based around content, we haven't talked about the importance of content to our experience, we haven't talked about the fact that what we vote for is content and not authors. We never talk about content.

We talk about votes. We don't talk about creation.

That is why we fail. That is the only and central reason that these mechanical systems fail to "create the best discussion on the Internet" if I may be allowed to lift from the Steem white paper. Because the system is designed to ignore content, the system is designed to ignore the individual, the system is designed to have nothing to do with content.

We are so obsessed with votes and how they move the money around in the fact that machines can do it better than humans can because of the design of the system that we forget that the votes are supposed to be for something. The votes are supposed to indicate we want that content. The votes are supposed to reward people who make that content. And so we create new systems which have nothing to do with content and nothing to do with the fact that I like that content and as such I want more of that content.

We do it over and over and we look surprised that we don't get more of the content, that content creators aren't rewarded as we feel they should be, that communities aren't really forming around content.

You get what you reward. Elementally, the system rewards wrangling votes and controlling the flow of SP. That's the game. I don't blame people who play the game well for playing the game well. I don't blame people who have noticed that humans simply cannot engage with the system through the curation architecture in a way that is profitable for humans. I don't blame people who recognize the truth.

And the truth is that vote buying is lucrative. The truth is that bots which run the system are more efficient than humans that run the system. The truth is that far fewer people care about creating good content or making good content or even consuming good content in the number of people who engage with the Steem blockchain as a collection of numbers to be manipulated to maximize the profit.

Now let's be clear, I am a Randian Objectivist. I am a hyper-capitalist. I believe that the market is a good thing, inherently, and one of the most efficient means by which we have to determine the relative value of things to individuals. Profit is not bad in my world. I want everyone to profit as much as they can. It is not a zero-sum game; it's the only game in town that is positive sum for everyone.

But I also believe that if we are going to talk about markets we need to understand what markets reward, but more importantly what the agents involved in those markets want to trade and why they're trading it.

Votes are valuable because they allow people who are vested in the blockchain to mitigate the risk and the sure inevitability of the inflationary currency which enters the blockchain every three seconds. That is their value. Their value has nothing to do with content, by design. Their value is a mitigation of the "cost" assessed to all involved in the Steem blockchain because of the inbuilt mechanism of inflation.

Step one, for everyone, who feels upset by what's going on, who wants something other than what they're getting, is to figure out what it is they want.

Are they just jealous that some people have more efficient means of mitigation and have mechanisms to aid them in offsetting and even acquiring more currency? I wouldn't blame them if they were, but we need to recognize that it's a rational desire which often gets masked by irrational excuse.

Are they angry and frustrated that content and content creators are being left behind because their method of engagement with the blockchain is actively, aggressively inefficient and is rarely sufficiently rewarding? That's a legitimate position to be taking and is often the one that's motivating me.

Are they upset that there are people who are involved with content they are not interested in and/or content that they find actively harmful to the overall community but who are being rewarded in ways that seem out of proportion? Every once in a while I feel like that, myself – but this is the most dangerous desire, because once you start picking winners and losers globally you tacitly acknowledge that others can and should (and ultimately will) do the same thing, and it will break badly for you.

We have to get through step one before we can do anything else, and no one wants to do that. Which is cool with me. I've got my own stuff to do. But it is entirely too common for the authoritarian collectivist impulse to be the idea that wins in the very loosely tied together community that is the people who use the Steem blockchain as a social network.

Other people can do what they want. They can believe what they want to believe. They can be crypto cultists or tyrants or crazy people or obsessives or control freaks or prudes or trolls – and frankly I don't care. All those people, all those kinds of people, exist.

What I want is a system that recognizes that I am capable of deciding for myself what people are good at what people are bad, what actions are good and what actions are bad, and allows me to tell it so that it can help me find more things that are good. And it doesn't matter if 10,000 people agree with me or know people agree with me, the system should work for me and the system should work for you.

I'm not holding my breath.