This is a common thing. When something is new and the people are new it’s easy to get hyped because there is not a long enough history of understanding to call it out as nonsense. Not that I am in anyway calling the project nonsense, I simple don’t know all that much about it. But let’s look at an example.

In this theoretical example I will use basketball.
Ok suppose I have a new kind of basketball shoe. New technology I claim, will make you jump higher run faster etc. it will change the game. If I made all these claims surely I would get money for the project but probably not a lot. So what’s the difference? What’s the correlation of people jumping into the steem-UA and selling basketball shoes? Collective knowledge base.

Almost every in every country pretty much knows what basketball is. Any developed country at least. People pretty much know how shoes work, they been around a long time. All the shoe wearers and players know how it works. This collective base of long standing knowledge creates many experts. Now I’m not saying you might be able to make a game changing shoe but if you try your going to have millions of people instantly calling it out of it isn’t. The collective knowledge base is a reality check against any kind of bumfuckery.

Ok so where does that leave us?

So this Steem-UA thing is all of a sudden popular, going to be ‘brand new reputation’ system. People see that and think yeah, that’s great because the current one is terrible. As newer user or even one that maybe doesn’t understand lots of technical stuff, I sure don’t, you might be inclined to support it. But what are you actually supporting?

The collective knowledge base on steemit is about a thimble size, it’s growing but it takes time. Especially considering it can be super technical.

The platform must invite and welcome an open discourse. Any project should welcome criticism. I’m not talking about just saying ‘this is stupid’ but welcoming those with knowledge to look at what your doing and see its flaws.

After reading this article I know a little more about steem-Ua. It sounded like something I’d support but after seeing it up voting a pile of poo, I’m gonna hold off. But I would like to see the project actually fix the reputation score. I hope that’s their intention and will follow through. Also I hope they and every other project would be more welcoming of critical commentary. It’s will be beneficial to all.

“Hearing you have succeeded makes you happy but hearing you made mistakes can only make you better”

-M