How is friends upvoting each other even a problem? That is the point. The follower feature is essential to the whole ecosystem, you cannot fix "friends supporting each other" without completely breaking any premise that social media, community and society itself is predicated on. Speaking of social media, the point is to gain an audience. You seem to think that it's a problem, or that people will not try to make friends with new people, that they won't vett friends to others and introduce them to their groups. I literally did just that with [@lordless.exyle](https://steemit.com/@lordless.exyle) and [@quillfire](https://steemit.com/@quillfire), I hardly can call them acquaintance to top it all off, I'm possibly THE most antisocial person on here and I'd give the most cave dwelling isolated recluse a run for their money but even someone as socially autistic as myself won't subscribe to the notion that "friends being friends" is a problem.

There's no voting rings, stop the nonsense. Also, the point of the proposal is not to rid the place of any profit maximizing behavior, it's to make profit maximizing behavior in line with discovering content, making friends and genuinely curating. It means that we compete with those who are dead set on extracting every penny they can get out of their stake by "maximizing", and we could even have a decent chance of outperforming them.

The white paper talks about how preventing abuse should not be the goal, the goal should be to penalize it because prevention comes with a much higher cost that everyone will be burdened with.

People can put money in their friends pocket and upvote cool shit, it's not as if those things are remotely exclusive to one another, they may very well be the same thing any number of times.

I wish people would really consider what the proposal is aimed at, instead of putting up these strawmen and false premises for what it is about, especially since the problem is clear and it's past the point of debating it, maybe then we can actually discuss the proposal or similar proposals that focuses on the actual problem instead of spinning in circles.

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