You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Next time you want to do an experiment...
Well this is a common argument. I agree with you. The argument "It is still on the blockchain" is for some people the same as saying "It is in a file cabinet at the Pentagon". "But they censored it...", "no they didn't you can file a FOIA request".
"Why did my favorite magazine stop publishing?"
"They had people yank their funding and couldn't afford to put that much effort to it any longer"
"Isn't that censorship?"
"No, just pulling their funding. They still could have done it for free."
As long as there are multiple accessible clients controlled by different people, the argument holds. Currently we have steemit.com, busy.org, steemdb.com, steemd.com as well as clients you can run directly on your machine. It's often literally just a case of changing two letters in the url. For some that may be too much, but we should hopefully get even better than that in the future.
Yes, I get this. Yet that is like a FOIA request for some people.
Different people have different tech levels. Just because it isn't censored to you or I, doesn't mean it won't be censored for someone who cannot do those things.
Furthermore, if I don't know it is there, will I bother to go look for it?
True, but it's also as good as we can do on a technical level. Removing censorship entirely is technically impossible, unless we remove all ability to filter out noise.
This is a cultural thing we need to encourage. Just like in Bitcoin we tell everyone over and over "if you don't control the keys it's not your Bitcoin", people should be encouraged to use interfaces which they're genuinely in control of. Whether that's entirely desktop-based stuff for the really hardcore anti-censorship user, or browser extensions which highlight potential censorship while using a website, it's a matter of getting people to acknowledge the possibility of censorship and use the tools that keep themselves in control.
I promote Steemit as a censorship-resistant platform on some of the subreddits which are interested in that. I always say "censorship resistant" not "censorship free", because all we can ultimately do is give people the tools to resist censorship. The expectation of "totally no censorship" is impossible and not even desirable (in the sense that there is value to filtering out noise that you don't want to see, and sometimes you trust others to determine what is noise, but it should be your decision how you go about that).
True. My point mainly is that CENSORSHIP has an obvious true technical thing.
Yet barriers can also have the same effect as censorship whether it is no funding, or extra steps to get at it.
So while technically there is no ACTUAL censorship as it is still on the blockchain. There are barriers which I think I've heard other sites/articles not on steemit refer to as Soft Censorship. I don't know that I really like that wording/phrase, but I share it here only so you might see what I am getting at.
I realize there is no actual censorship since it is available on the blockchain and it isn't as if the book was burned.
It was simply moved to a corner room on the third floor down a little used hallway. :) (yes, it may not be this bad... but I was enjoying the imagery)
So people can hide behind "it was not censored" not just here but, many places. When depending upon the barriers involved the end result can be the same as if it were censored.
If no one wants to put forth the effort now required to see it, then it can become as if it was not written. It is there, but it may not be witnessed.
Likewise the book may not be burned, but people voting for a person to write a book, and then having one or two other people come along and say "don't write it" and thus have no money to write it could actually be WORSE than burning the book.
Why?
A Burned book at least existed for awhile. Someone may have read it. It was a creation.
If funding is attacked for subjective reasons cancelling out the funding other people would give it then that can kill future books before they are even written.
So is it technically censorship? No. Yet it can have the same end result, and in some cases may be worse.
I actually think that is technically censorship. Not just soft censorship, but censorship. Like I said, there's no such thing as a censorship-free platform.
The best we can do is:
I think we are making good progress on all three of these on Steem.
I think I can agree with that. This is also why we talk about it. We can't fix it by ignoring it.