This is the post in which I tell you that Jerry Banfield was right about something.
Sorry, I should have warned you that was coming. Sit down, take a few deep breaths. Can I bring you some tea? I can't? You can't send tea over the internet? I would buy into that ICO, let me tell you.
Anyway, a few days ago Jerry made this post about how flags are bad, bad, bad, and don't worry, he's not right about that part. The main thrust of his post is self-serving and deceptive as always. But he did say something that caught my attention a little bit:
Don't like someone's skin color? Downvote them! Dislike someone's religion? Kill off their account with downvotes. Hate a certain sexual orientation? Silence their voice with a downvote long enough and they will leave.
This tied in with something 
I think that's definitely a legitimate criticism and one we need to consider. So far 4chan and the like haven't decided we're important enough to mess with, and the biggest problem we have is Jerry himself. Maybe some things like Dan flagging posts critical of EOS.
What we haven't seen is an organized campaign to shut down any woman who has any power, any voice of her own, the way we've seen them on Twitter. We haven't seen a war against the SteemJet folks by white supremacists who don't want to see them organized and effective.
If we're looking for mass adoption, we're going to see those things. 4chan and the like have the users, they have the resources, they have the bot-making ability to completely shut down the effectiveness of legitimate Steem users.
And not only do I not see any evidence that we're prepared for that, if we're trying to prepare for that it's not anywhere I can see. We're spending our time developing complex systems to limit the rewards from self-voting, while at the same time making it easier to sign up in the first place. We might as well be painting a target on ourselves.
This is what worries me about the future of Steem. We like to talk about a day when Steem is a large-scale player in social media, but to get there we're going to have to face down the existing large players. And while that includes economic powerhouses like Facebook, it also includes decentralized associations of colossal assholes.
What do we do to not get eaten by them?