STEEM - freedom of speech, or power to the rich?

in #steemit7 years ago

shutterstock_187662866.jpg

So yesterday I wrote an article named EOS - is the ICO a SCAM?, where I suggested that the way the ICO was being held showed the real intentions of block.one (aka Daniel Larimer & Co.).
Although the post has been hidden due to low ratings for reasons I will continue to explain, you can still read it here: https://steemit.com/eos/@eltapatio/eos-is-the-ico-a-scam (just click on show)

As you can see, I am a pretty small user, who has been posting here every now and then for about a month already.
Usually my posts are not read by many people, and do not tend to cause big enough reactions, but I was surprised when yesterday, my post on EOS, got a comment by @crypt0, who is well known by the crypto community.

I was getting good feedback from readers, most of who shared or at least appreciated my views on the topic, and the overall rating was positive, with 10 up votes and 1 down vote.
My reputation was growing and went from the initial 25 to 32, and I was getting some new followers.
Everything changed once a user named @dan gave me a negative vote, which led to my current situation, with the post being hidden and my reputation score at 12 (less than half the original figure).

I want to make clear that my intention is not to complain about people giving me negative ratings, or not agreeing on what I think, as that's absolutely normal.
What I don't really understand is why a single down vote can remove a post and hide it from future potential readers, without the need to justify this.

As you can see from the following screenshot, there are 10 positive votes and 2 negative ones:
Captura de pantalla 2017-07-05 a las 17.56.35.png

When I go to my blog section and try to open the article I wrote, I get the following message:
Captura de pantalla 2017-07-05 a las 17.56.10.png

So when I saw that the general feedback was absolutely positive, and yet my post was removed, I realized that there was something wrong, so I made some research to find out why this happened.

My two negative votes where by:

  • @blacklist-a, which is a bot to prevent people auto voting themselves.
  • @dan, who's name does not say much at first sight.

I used the website www.steemd.com to find out more about these two profiles, and I saw something interesting.

  • @blacklist-a is not a very powerful member, so even if I was to be blacklisted (which I shouldn't be, and was not given a reason why I was), his vote wouldn't have harmed my reputation.
  • @dan's profile looks like this:
    Captura de pantalla 2017-07-05 a las 18.07.10.png

These are signs of a very powerful account, so I started to understand what was going on here.
This guy has over 3000 followers, and only writes and resteem's positive things about EOS, as you can see:
Captura de pantalla 2017-07-05 a las 18.12.43.png

He only follows 3 people:
Captura de pantalla 2017-07-05 a las 18.14.15.png

And he is among the 12 profiles being followed by @blacklist-a.

At this point, it was already clear who he was (he is Dan Larimer). I just did not understand why he has two profiles, being @dantheman the main one and @dan the secondary one.

This is what he wrote on my article (with my answer below his comment):
Captura de pantalla 2017-07-05 a las 18.40.07.png

He clearly talks about himself as a part of block.one team.

Now, I don't really know if it was known to people who @dan is, but that's not really the point of all this.
My point is that all this BS about decentralization, no governments or central banks, and FREEDOM, are not portrayed in this platform, where a single powerful person can shut people up as easily as @dan did, even though the overall feedback was well over 80% positive, and I did not infringe any terms (even though he blacklisted me as well through @blackist-a).

Shouldn't we be able to argue and give our opinions, whether positive or negative, without being removed from the platform?

Isn't that the whole point of the internet and decentralization (blockchain), to be able to express ourselves freely without fear of potential negative consequences?

I believe this is not what @dan and his team want to create, and I believe they make a big mistake by removing articles they don't want people to see, instead of intelligently replying and exposing people like me (in case they can do such think, which I believe they cannot).

Sooner or later, people will know the truth.

Thanks for reading.

Sort:  

Trolls and FUDers are heavily "abused" and punished in steem, why don't you go back to your Bitcointalk Troll Cave and join the rest of your kind? Plenty of sladerous threads to play there!

How is it FUD?
Why don't you provide arguments to prove me wrong instead of calling me a troll and downvoting to hide my post?

I could write too a steemit post titled "Is eltapatio a pedophile and rapist?" in this "post" of mine I would write a lot of nonsenses and misinformation that have nothing to do with the title of my article and then I would ask people for "arguments" to prove me wrong!

That's what you are doing.

DO YOU GET IT?

Why are you selling EOS through the exchanges and eos.io website at the same time?
Why is the price clear at the exchanges and hidden at your website?

https://etherscan.io/address/0x9937dbb2128b55c44d8af7bf36fd76796a814cf4#internaltx
How do you explain these transactions? Why do you withdraw all the ETH from your website, to once again dump it into the market on exchanges and raise the price?

You really have no clue what you are talking about. It seems that you just learnt about EOS yesterday and today you are jumping in to conclusions. If you don't get it, stay away from it.

btw "THEY" are NOT selling EOS throught the exchanges, it's the participants like you and me that sell in to the exchanges, price in NOT hiden at the website, just do the math dude it cant be that hard, can it? If you are having difficulties, here is some help http://eosscan.io/ the more the people that participate through the day the more the price will rise.

Why do you withdraw all the ETH from your website, to once again dump it into the market on exchanges and raise the price?

It's not "my" website and for gods sake read the f@$k!ng FAQ dude, you are clueless and you just spreading missinformation and nothing more.

I'm sorry, I should have said "why are you BUYING at exchanges and SELLING at your website, with a HIDDEN PRICE?
Price is hidden as you manipulate the amount of ETH received on eos.io at your will (you dump as much as you want to increase the price for regular investors).
Who is talking about what EOS does or claims to do? It looks like you need to learn to read before you reply.
If you would have read the post, you would know that I wrote the formula used to calculate the price of EOS on your website, but since you claim that "depending on ethereum traffic... bla bla... we can do whatever the f*** we want", there's no formula to calculate such scam.
Now tell me, because it looks like you have been dodging the bullets trying to make me look stupid,

WHY DO YOU WITHDRAW THOSE HUGE AMOUNTS OF ETH RAISED THROUGH THE WEBSITE?

WHY DO YOU HAVE TWO DIFFERENT WAYS OF PURCHASING EOS TOKENS, ONE WITH A VISIBLE PRICE AND ONE WITH AN INVISIBLE AND MANIPULATED PRICE?

HOW DID THE PRICE FAIRLY RISE FROM 0,925$ TO OVER 5$, KNOWING THAT YOU ARE DUMPING 2 MILLION SHITCOINS EVERY 23 HOURS?

WASN'T YOUR AIM TO OFFER A FAIR PRICE WITH THIS SCAM?

But hey, you are getting audited, as @dan said, therefore it's physically impossible for you to buy and manipulate the price at exchanges ;)

Thanks you for revealing your Trollish nature, have a nice day!

Sure, I made some clear and precise questions which you didn't answer and yet I'm the troll.
Keep hiding the truth, sooner or later it will come out and you will be exposed once again.
Good luck dodging bullets and censoring people ;)

2nd time I see @dan downvoting xD he just censors stuff, that's not what we are here for..
I just read that post btw and I agree with you on most stuff (I didn't participate in the ICO as it is squetchy af), @dan probably doesn't want bad publicity otherwise he wouldn't buy that 10.000th yatch xD
Also, it's really bad that after you get low ratings images are not displayed anymore :/

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This story remind me of the plot in the show Silicon Valley where CEO of Hooli Gavin has his team block out all the bad rating about Hooli in Hooli Search. @Dan nice job no one but you expose yourself. #scam

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play stupid games
win stupid prizes.

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