Censorship is not only preventing people from speaking, it's any suppression of their speech, and downvotes certainly do suppress speech. In fact, it is their ability to censor spam, scams, and plagiarism that make them necessary to Hive.
Please search up any authoritative source for a definition of censorship to see that I am speaking the truth. I have in the past provided links to Webster's, Wikipedia, Britannica, and others, but feel you are more than capable of doing so yourself, and likely to more benefit from doing so, as people seem to feel links others provide are somehow suspect.
What you write is true up to a certain point. What you provide is a very broad definition of the term censorship, a definition in some ways political, and being political, very elastic, which society uses with convenient interpretations depending on the situation.
Censorship is impediment to expression. Nobody prevents you from expressing yourself on Hive. You can do it. In compliance with the rules of the environment.
I don't think you let anyone come into your house and start saying whatever they want. I guess you set limits on what your guests can express, beyond which you kick them out of the house. Even the most democratic states have statutory limits on what is free speech. And I say this while thinking that there shouldn't be crimes of opinion as they exist in all states. Similarly Hive has rules: you can write and express whatever you want and NOBODY can prevent it. He just has no means to do that. But the community can keep you from making money from what you write. If what you want to communicate is of fundamental importance to you, I don't think making money from it is relevant.
There is no other environment that has more freedom on this than Hive. Or rather, they exist, but the overlapping of voices, often of poor quality, with no possibility of limitation, has led those places to simply not be frequented: even the background noise limits the diffusion of your message.
I pretty strongly agree with what you say here. I have all too often encountered stake holders trying to bamboozle people into believing that downvotes aren't censorship, which leaves people vulnerable to their misunderstanding, and that is why I interejected at all.
Indeed, that is why I'm here today.