RE: I'm Andrew. The guy who put together a steemit experiment that blew up in his face and costed him $570!
To be fair, I do not believe anyone called you a scammer because it was suspected that you wouldn't pay as promised. The reason you were downvoted is that paying individuals does not bring value to the platform and some of us value the success of platform more than $10 worth of Bitcoin.
The broader motive of the "value exchange" as you call it, is to produce a positive externality in the form of valuable content which enriches not only a specific voter, but the community and platform as a whole. Paying money to voters alone does not do that, so naturally those of us with the broader view see it as a poor value for our reward fund; therefore we downvote.
Nothing wrong with doing experiments, but for experiments to be meaningful they have to accept the possibility of an unfavorable (for some) outcome, as happened here.
But it does bring people to Steemit. I wouldn't have even bothered to touch this platform if I didn't get involved as escrow. I also got a few people from the Litecoin community to join in on this.
It also taught us all that there's a serious issue with bot abuse. All it takes is someone with a few bots and they can censor any post or comment that they want.
You are misunderstanding how this works. Unlike reddit where is is indeed documented that sock puppet bot armies can censor posts by downvoting them, in Steem, stake-based voting means that such tactics are ineffective. If someone wants to take stake that he owns and turn it into a bunch of bot accounts, that does not in any way gain influence over what could have been achieved using that same stake in a single account (in fact it is very slightly weaker).
Most of the bots on Steem are harmless gnats with little stake that are doing not much of anything except trying to make a tiny reward here and there, or perhaps cause annoyance and FUD. Your posts and comments got hidden because they were flagged by a majority of the stake that voted on them, not because of bots.
I understand what you're saying but you can't underestimate the psychological value of a high flag count. I'm sure some people went, "oh look how many people flagged this" and just ticked that flag away without fully reading the post. In fact, to some extent I'm sure it did because some of my talks with people in #steemitabuse-classic demonstrated they didn't know there was an escrow involved and was the basis for their claim that they flagged me because I was preforming a scam. I totally understand your viewpoint and where you are coming from, and I can respect the intent but you can't assume others hold to the same standard.
It seems quite broken though. One guy who didn't have much voting power downvoted one of my replies (before anyone upvoted it) and it was flung off the page instantly. That shouldn't happen. This means all it takes to hide a comment/post is 1 downvote before anyone else upvotes it and very few people will see it.