TIL: Posts on Steemit can Be CENSORED Without Explanation!
Today I learned: All someone has to do to censor a post is downvote it rapidly before anyone else has voted on it.
This was just done on my recent post about a 911 CIA whistleblower and the result was that the entire post became invisible, both to me - and I presume to others too!
This is exactly how posts are shut down on reddit and voat too - with the result being that sometimes valuable posts really are silenced.
In this case, the post was quickly downvoted from this account: @fatboy - which holds significant steem power and thus was able to completely shut down the post. Fortunately I was able to use Randowhale to buy a vote to correct the situation and the post continued on as normal.
This raises a serious issue though - it is entirely possible for those who intend to censor others to do so here and with really little more than a few bots that monitor the target's profile and act to shut down any posts that match keywords that are to be censored.
Is there no official way to deal with this?
EDIT: I just wrote a new post with suggestions on how to improve Steemit's quality management process without inviting censorship.
Thanks...
Wishing you well
Ura Soul
Steemit T-shirts, Hoodies and Many Other Steemit Inspired Products are On Sale Now
Buy your "Steemit, Dreamit, Memeit, Teamit" T-Shirts, Gifts & Other Clothing Here.
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.
Thanks for the update, I missed this post. Thanks to those trying to censor you, you now have extra votes from myself, for all the good they'll do you.
I've been trying to get people to check out Susan Lindauer, among others, for some time now. People ask, "where are the whistle blowers?" Susan is one to point to. It is criminal that our government is using authoritarian tactics, such as communist-like abuse of the mental health profession to shut up honest people.
On the upside, her plight was what made me realize the corruption and propagandistic nature of DemocracyNow! It wasn't until I learned of Susan, and her story, that I saw Goodman and company for the shills that they are.
Thanks, I missed your comment here too.. strangey! There have been several cases where Democracy Now has been shown to be controlled propaganda. I generally had a feeling of that all along, but they did also put out material that suggests the opposite - so it seems they have a fairly narrow propaganda agenda, but it exists none the less. Thanks for the support here, I have made a few more posts in this series that are also important.
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.
I dunno dude, you have a big fat advertisement in your post. Like shoving your reproductive organ in people's faces, most people don't like that. You probably got flagged as a spammer
Greetings! The advert is for Steemit T-shirts, hardly an off topic effort!
In any case, if there is a problem, the appropriate action is to send a message, not to try to silence a post that specifically is intended to help humanity out of some of the evilest shit to ever hit the planet. I highly doubt the t-shirt advert is the problem here.
Does it ever make ya wonder who ELSE IS IN HERE?
I know the human responsible in my case and from what I do know, I do not consider the action to be a 'random' one.
Well, I am sorry you endure it, but keep steeming. You have very relevant content I like to share, upvote and resteemed!
fyi, I just wrote a new post with suggestions on how to improve Steemit's quality management process without inviting censorship.
Had a few hit me too bro.
Thanks for letting us know. A solution is necessary for this if steemit is to be taken as a serious improvement to it's competitors in terms of resistance to censorship.. What's the point of an allegedly uncensorable blockchain if a method for censoring is built in anyway!?
Ikr? I went back and forth with a couple whales about it on a bandwidth post a few days ago. 'nobody has the power to do that' and I said ya they do! I made a post that was upvoted 4 or 5 times prior to a couple heavy hitters coming along and kicking it out of sight. Was total bs and I made sure they knew what the difference between censorship and not liking a post should be.
I am about to make a post with a suggested new design for steemit to resolve these issues. stay tuned!
fyi, I just wrote a new post with suggestions on how to improve Steemit's quality management process without inviting censorship.
Sharing it to get it seen by more folks!
Hmmm.....
Your situation inspired me to write a new post. I wrote this for you and others that haven't been here long. I don't generally post my links in comments unless it is relevant. It is relevant here and I hope it brings you some comfort.
Thanks for this @dwinblood.
I was not personally inspired by this incident but I was inspired by others and produced a post that I feel compliments your information. :c)
Censorship can take many forms and restricting access to information is a form of censorship. It denies users the ability to access information as conveniently as most other information. It is both dishonorable and a disservice to users to restrict access to information that one does not agree with rather than contest the information concerned.
As such, I sympathize with people like @ura-soul, @matchecahelo, @enginewitty, and others.
fyi, I just wrote a new post with suggestions on how to improve Steemit's quality management process without inviting censorship.
Good you raised this! It needs to be nipped in the bud quickly. If this continues it will destroy the whole @Steemit network we can not have censoring or it will become like Facebook!
How do you tell you’ve been down voted? How do you even downvote?
Downvotes are made through the 'flag' icon. Instead of going into a pool of downvoted posts for some kind of review, the system instead just minuses one from the total. you can see the downvotes, if they are significant in the popup list of voters for the post.
Right thanks @ura-soul. Not that I need to know. If I don’t like a post I just dont give it my attention everyone is entitled to their opinion. Maybe I would flag insenative stuff or wwrong but i’ve not come across any yet :)