RE: Can You Explain Why This Post Exposing an Alleged High Profile Scammer on Steemit is Censored, Despite a Ratio of 44 Upvotes to 1 Downvote!?
While the situation on Steemit is better than Facebook, for example, in that the posts can be viewed by anyone who desires to - the reality remains that if there were no 'censoring' qualities to the act of hiding a post then there would be no value in the function of hiding a post.
There are so many posts in Steemit that some users will simply glance over hidden posts and assume that the hiding is just. I don't have any figures for it but I think that it is probably true that hidden posts get less views and upvotes as compared to when the same post is made and not hidden.
In my own case, a perfectly valid post that was part of a popular and important series of posts was downvoted and hidden only a few seconds after I posted it, thankfully I recovered it by (ironically) the use of randowhale - a bot.
My post on this specific topic that contains suggestions for improvements, goes into all of this in some depth.
It doesn't censor as it invalidates censorship to make a button that uncensored wherever there is censorship. It's not the quality of censorship, that is a stretch, it's the quality of hiding a post, or making content not visible initially that is worthy, that in itself is what makes it a staple here for curating shit content.
It's not censorship, addressing it by what it is, or flagging, curating, hiding content is correct, calling it censorship because of "censorship qualities" is a stretch and a meaningless one, either it's censored or it's not, so far people on the internet distinguish between flagged content and censored content, and they are very distinguishable, as one simply offers a warning instead of the content, or a black box, or usually no trace of the content, while the other simply warns as it presents the content. It's the difference between content being available and content not being available.
Even if you can demonstrate that hidden posts get less views than unhidden posts on average, the factors that are responsible for that includes where, when, the subject, the author and the audience and that data would be inconclusive at best because of those factors. I guarantee that you will find that posts hidden get less views, as it's completely to reason, but at the same time I bet that certain responses and posts get more views because they were initially hidden.
i have no problem with not calling it 'censorship', but if something is hidden it is by definition now not fully available in a published format alongside the other posts. obviously, i don't make posts to steemit for them to be hidden. i personally feel that what i am posting usually will draw enough attention without me needing to add 'mystery' to it by having it hidden. i do though think it is justified to say that hidden posts are 'semi censored' - since they do result in some of the people who would have potentially encountered the material from not encountering it, just as if it was fully censored.
this though, is not the end of the issue, since the author also loses money and reputation due to the downvotes - which is a whole other dimension to the equation.
It is fully available in published format, it just requires one press a button.
That's not your choice, the community curates content as they wish. Curating content affects visibility, lower curated content will be obviously further down the list than better more curated content, and that is only if you sort content by curation, if you go to the author you can see the content alongside their other content as it was published.
If it's hidden it's hidden, if it's not available then it has to not be available, if it's censored it has to not be available anymore. Obviously it's not any less available because the user is presented with a warning instead of the content directly.
It's not semi-censored, it's either censored or it's not. There is no "somewhat censored". It's censored or it's not.
You cannot argue that they lose money when the rewards are still getting voted on, the author didn't lose money, they didn't get all the rewards they were expecting because people voted against them. The reputation is a metric that more or less is based on what others curated your account as, so if it affects reputation it's because it's their right to curate content, negatively or positively, they can give you a zero start or a one star out of 5 or 5 million, they have given their opinion.
'published' implies full access alongside other published items. If I publish a book via a publisher, I am not going to accept it being put behind a hidden door in the shop's bookshelf just because someone else decides it should be because they have more money than me.
That's all well and good in theory, but it's not 'the community' as some kind of perfect, altruistic and balanced entity. What is actually occurring is that those with the most money have the capacity to limit the reach of specific posts and publishers with impunity. The decision is currently not based on merit, but rather on wallet size. If 40+ people in the community decide that something should not be hidden, it may make no difference because one single voter with more wallet size disagrees. Democracy doesn't work that way, oligarchy does. Your position here smacks, ironically, of a communist dictator who decrees that 'the people have spoken' when in truth it was actually just one individual speaking who holds an unbalanced amount of power in the system. Yes, it is possible for the rest of the community to rally around those who are unfairly treated, but the system itself contains no specific facility or that and that is why I suggested to include one in my post on the topic.
I am aware that Dan has specifically included some kind of conflict resolution system into EOS, so it is obviously not just me that has a concern - though I don't yet know the details of that.
As already stated, marketing theory and practise makes clear that visibility is king in many cases. Information system theory shows the same in terms of human- computer interaction. The human visual cortex is virtually hardwired in many people to be drawn to shiny things - sad but true.
They do literally lose money since payouts are directly reduced due to downvotes, as I understand - they also get less payout due to less visibility and thus less downvotes. That's fine for validly downvoted posts, but that is not what I am highlighting.