@mariannewest

It might surprise you. but we want to see good content creators get more rewards too.
Something you might be overlooking, is: when an abuser DOESN'T get a reward for their useless content, the rewards of other content creators increases. That's how the reward pool works. It distributes a more or less fixed amount of STEEM, between those with a positive pending payout on their posts. So the less STEEM abusers get, the more high quality content creators such as yourself earn.
For instance the whale-no-voting experiment started by @abit two years ago, increased the voting power of every minnow by a significant sum. In other words, less posts with pending payouts, a higher payout for the remaining posts.

Regarding whether this is censorship or not: even when a post reaches 0.00$ payout, it's not hidden from the various Steem UI (steemit, steempeak, etc'). Everyone can still access it, and be exposed to the content of the post(no matter how useless it is). The word you're looking for is demonetization, which means, making certain types of content\activity unprofitable; i.e posting random images from the internet to upvote them for 2$, each.
People can post whatever they want to Steem. But it doesn't mean they should necessarily earn from it