RE: TIL: Posts on Steemit can Be CENSORED Without Explanation!
If they have a higher reputation to you it doesn't hide it. It does put it to a reveal status as this is the way that spam, plagiarism, and abuse are currently fought. Unfortunately there is no programmatic way to stop someone from being an ASS and down voting stuff simply for disagreement other than people finding out that person is doing that and us removing support from them. Your post is not gone. All you need is someone with a decent reputation to up vote your stuff, and we can also look at steemdb.com and see who the ass was that did it. So it isn't actually completely censored and that is what they will semantically argue. Yet, in a sense it is. Though unlike those other places if people like me and others find out about it we can counter that vote. I'll go see what post I can find.
There are some DISAPPEARING posts lately but they happen almost instantly and if that happens that is not due to a vote that is due to a bug they need to fix. It happened to me the other day and I wrote about it here. If your post is completely gone then this is likely what happened as people cannot actually delete your posts and being hidden due to a down vote can be countered.
If a post is hidden, then most people are not going to be attracted to even look at it. There are so many posts that the eye will just scan over it and ignore it in many cases - if that weren't the case then why even bother having such a function of hiding the post in the first place?
It therefore means that I have to take time out of my day to find a way to get upvotes from people i specifically message, which might take time - at which point the key 'initial hour' has probably passed already and thus the post never goes anywhere. That's a fact of how the system works and is exactly why the censoring entities do what they do. I know for sure that this is censorship because I have been posting controversial material for years and I have seen the same patterns repeat over and over. I can post all day long about 'some' topics on reddit, for example - in the conspiracy subreddit.. but if i touch on certain subjects, regardless of how good the sources and evidence are - boom - there's a good chance i'll have to go through this charade. I will be posting today of a suggested methodology for improving all of this which increases balance.
I don't actually know if this is true or not. It's hard to say. I don't know if a study is done on this. I click REVEAL on quite a few things just to see what they were and if it was anything I was interested in.
That said... it is not something you can get rid of without opening the platform to potentially larget problems.
If that function did not exist then we've seen abuse problems. At one point we used to allow even the first image on the post if animated gif to animate in the feed showing all posts. I distinctly remember a time before the hiding, and while that was possible of a very graphic animated blow job in the feed.
There are a number of younger people here, and it could be argued if they are here they are smart enough to find porn if they want. Yet there are also other people that may be offended by it. This could be true of extremely graphic violence or something like that too.
So this is why for example the NSFW tag can be used to auto hide such things. They still do quite well. Yet you do need an ability to create a "do you want to see this" type of gateway for some content.
Unfortunately there are not easy solutions.
You are going to encounter the occasional jerk that thinks in their arrogance that the topics they are not interested in should not be interesting to anyone.
All we can do is remove support from them. Some people may even go so far as to flag them back, but that's not really my style. I don't see going after those being negative by being negative as positive for the steem platform. I've not seen it be effective in a single case that I can think of. It kind of becomes war like.
So best you can do is let people that support you know what is going on and we'll find ways to counter jerks.
I have written in some length on this issue in my last post - I think maybe you haven't looked at it yet.
"If that function did not exist then we've seen abuse problems."
your example of porn animations already has the NSFW mechanism to handle it - but downvotes can be used for literally any post at all. it is obvious that hiding a post harms it's effectiveness, it's just simple logic (at least to me as someone who studies human, computer interfacing professionally).
yes, some will click the post to reveal it out of curiosity - but that will be a small minority. most people don't open most posts even when they aren't hidden!
I just finished reading and responding to your post. You were correct I hadn't read it yet as I was reading my replies from oldest to newest.
How do you know this? Have you done a study to compare views?
NSFW posts are hidden by default and they are making some good money.
Just look at the view count on most posts. I know from my own posts that until I was at reputation 50+ i would rarely get more than 3-8 views (according to my admittedly sometimes flawed memory). Most users of steemit have a relatively low reputation, so it follows they will be getting less views still.. There are thousands of active users and so obviously, since most posts only get a few views, there is no option but to accept that what you have quoted in mathematically accurate.
You also if you watch the views will see a lot more people up vote stuff rather than actually look at it. This bothers me a bit.
I think that is due to the way that curation rewards are given to those who vote new posts that later become popular. Some voters are basically gambling with their voting power by trying to pick posts that get big without even bothering to read them - plus there are probably bots involved too and also just people wanting to push certain topics to the top of the list.
Yeah I believe you are right. I actually wouldn't mind seeing curation rewards go away, but that would remove a way for people to benefit from investing in steem that are not good at producing content.