Well, I believe this kind of voting on people, where your only option is to upvote or downvote, is pure madness. Because what does the single vote mean? And how well you know the other person?

I think that many of us, maybe most of us, can say "I struggle all my life to know myself better and I am failing". Knowing others, even when they are our beloved ones, can be even harder. And suddenly we can have influence on some strangers life by voting on her/him?

Here at Steemit we are voting for content. But what does it say about some person if she/he got a lot of votes on her/his content? Can she/he write good content? Or she/he is social and have a lot of friends? Or is a part of group that supports each other regardless of content quality? Voting is simple and produces very simple data. But we have to be very careful about what we are trying to do with this data.

I know and love this Churchill's citation. And I completely agree. Maybe we should invent some new kind of democracy, where electors could vote only on competencies and political programs. Because obviously, today populism seems to be a solid part of democracy and this is totally breaking it. I know, it is easy to say "voting on competencies" - I have no freaking idea how it could be accomplished. How common citizen can measure who has best competencies in area, that this voting citizen has no clue about.
Or maybe, there is some other way. Like in spreading innovations in technology. What makes that open source is wining the race with closed source? How it is possible that something started by bunch of random hippie like hackers, hobbyists and curious students with no money and no backup only with their passion, and hunger for knowledge and experimenting is wining with teams of top world best specialists backed by top technology and corporate's billions?