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RE: TIL: Posts on Steemit can Be CENSORED Without Explanation!
Welcome to my world, brother... Quite a few of my posts have been smashed because I talk about controversial topics.
It's obviously not an issue in your case, but the downvotes really destroyed my reputation and I'm still recovering from it now!!
I'm glad somebody with a high rep is bringing this topic up - thanks!
I see, ok - you are welcome! This kind of activity is the lowest of the low as far as social networks go - let's keep finding ways to prevent this occurring. followed!
We need to form up as a community and when we find people that are down voting purely for disagreement we need to stop following them, stop supporting them, and as far as I'm concerned ostracize them. We can also up vote posts they target to counter their actions. Flagging them back just perpetuates the problem and becomes a revenge like thing that usually ends up war like and doesn't generally result in positive outcomes.
I was thinking of creating an account whose sole purpose is to uphold freedom of speech on steemit. Maybe something like if somebody gets flagged as going against freedom of speech, this account will continue to post on everything they post, alerting people of where they've censored a seemingly innocent opinion. The culprit would be able to clean their name by upvoting the post they downvoted or something like that.
What do you think? too aggressive?
I've not seen counter flagging work in a single instance. It just escalates. I'd see such an account more beneficial as being available to UP VOTE any such posts that are identified as having been flagged/down voted purely for opinion.
I just wrote a post explaining this... I was inspired by this incident.
I just wrote a new post with suggestions on how to improve Steemit's quality management process without inviting censorship.
Hello, my name is Urma and I am Baah's caretaker.
I think it's great that my little baah baah black sheep has learned so much about this topic, however there is something that you should know.
Baah was injured with autism after receiving the Varicella vaccine and as such struggles when he wants to interact with people.
Please remember this when speaking to him, as he is my little randy dandy boyo.
You will be on their terms, as you have taken war to them, subversive war is war, and positive outcome relies on vests vs vests, who's got the effort to flag, or the voting power if it's through a bot. If they are doing it with a bot, you cannot do anything about that. What's important is that censorship in this form can only happen if you consider the fact that the topic or comment is replaced with a big button which says "reveal" which isn't hard to distinguish as that's the strangest looking duck out of the bunch! To posit the argument that people won't see that kind of content goes directly against my experiences and others. It actually gives the content more exposure and volume sometimes, and even legitimacy.
It's a stretch to define censorship by the function to affect visibility by choice, but with the default value of "hidden". To cry censorship on a platform that is inherently censorship proof and insinuate that it makes posts invisible, or somehow hidden completely, or that it's not ok to flag things within the first hour, or simply because of disagreement, isn't akin to solving any real problem, where you would need to substantiate the effects with numbers.
Flagging even if it affect visibility, doesn't remove or move or make content unavailable, and not only that, it makes it stand out more since it's replaced with a button, almost begging to be clicked. Flagging is essentially curating content, if somehow it's not implied already, curating is a subjectively valued action. Because some might consider spam @skeptic will consider it SELF DEFENSE, the same over flags, what some consider abuse, others consider their considerations abuse. And nobody needs to explain themselves, people are free to take offense as they wish after all.
Self voting is equally something that people consider abusive, and they are considered abusive for considering that by the self voters.
You can find common ground, but yelling censorship to hype up you being flagged, is hardly common ground, or a systemic problem.
It's a beautiful irony. The thing is that like you know, there is always a hundred and one ways to do things and a million and one ways how to undo them. Execution is crucial.