The Great Reward Pool Rape Debate: A minnows perspective on the @berniesanders vs @haejin 2017 Steemit Beef

I won't summarize the debate because I believe that @pawsdog has already done a great job of doing that here. I just wanted to give you the perspective of a newly minted minnow that happened to swim by when all of the commotion was happening.

The "@haejin still raping the reward pool! title" was really catchy and like the minnow that I was I took the bait and clicked the link. I was quickly reeled into the audience. The sad thing is that I started to read through all of the post and the drama and it caused me to lose trust in the platform. I didn't lose trust in the platform because I was taking a specific side.

I feel like I am pretty neutral. I am new to the platform and I have only been on here for 2 days. When I read the Bernie article I had only been on Steemit for 2 hours.

Imagine being in a new country for the first time as an immigrant and within two hours of being in the country you see people rioting. I know people here can't really break rules so much because the feature of the platform limits the types of behavior possible, but people are really abusing the features of the platform in order to assert their will and what you see coming out of this is very anti-social behavior.

I am talking about both the abusive use of flagging and the ability of individuals to use their influence to funnel a huge chunk of the rewards pool towards a single individual.

I didn't dig too much into the comments because I felt that going into the comments might make me biased. I decided to do my own independent research by using steemworld.org and steemd.com to track exactly how much influence people have and how much that influence translates into their ability to shift the rewards within the site. What I discovered is a little concerning.

I won't bother posting charts, graphs, and other forms of evidence because I feel what I have to say is pretty simple. I get that having steam power is like having equity in the platform and I get that the people that have the most steam power should have a vested interest in the platform, so it makes sense for them to have more influence, but as a new person on Steemit my expectations were that Steemit was supposed to be a little different from the real world. I have nothing against capitalism. I am an economist by trade and I can defend the virtues of the free market with the best of them, but I also understand the limitations of the free market.

I am not advocating for communism, but I didn't expect to come here and see some of the worst aspects of the free market being played out in front of me either. There is a side of me that doesn't blame the people and would rather blame the system, but all systems have limitations and when the systems reach their limitations that's when human decency needs to step in. There will never be an economic system, system of law, or software platform that can end assholery, therefore there will always be a need for the culture and the community to step in and make people better.

That is my for what its worth.