Well I for one am glad you are here. I also see you have a bit of a problem I share. We often write long replies that likely would have been better suited as our own post so as to potentially reach a larger audience here on steemit. On the other hand I like long replies at times. I will do so if the inspiration calls. If I then think it worthy of its own post I will sometimes go and write a post as well.
Blockchain tech can change the world, and I believe that is unavoidable. It is a tool. Like any tool it can be used for malevolent or benevolent purposes. We are on an open blockchain here, but that does not mean the government could not embrace blockchain and push one upon us that is not open. In otherwords, it could be turned against us. Thus, we must remain vigilant and continue to breathe life into the blockchains we like for as they grow and are used they become increasingly difficult for them to stop.
This blockchain for example they would need to find and stop around 100 witnesses (and growing) spread around the world. Some of these may be easier to stop than others (how many of them use Amazon for their hosting for example, those are actually easy to target, or Azure by Microsoft?). Yet they cannot stop them all and new ones can be created.
This is how it is kept alive. The top 19 witnesses are the active ones and they are rewarded a decent amount of steem for their work. That is pretty lucrative for them when steem is worth a good amount.
We vote on them and people run campaigns to be one on the blockchain.
With that said I've seen what I would call soft censorship here before, it is getting better. I call it that because a powerful person deciding they don't like something might vote it down so it only makes $0. If the person doesn't rely on funding for their work at all then perhaps that does nothing to them. If they do rely on the funding to be able to produce their piece then that can be just like someone pulling funding in real life. Were they technically censored? I think it is word play a bit, as I do see it as repression and potentially censorship when it happens. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often and with HF19 it is easier for us to counter than before.
People can also be down voted and their content hidden without clicking SHOW HIDDEN, or REVEAL. This is needed to protect against things that people should have to option to view and to rid the feeds of things like spam and such.
Yet it can also happen for disagreement which I am very strongly against. This technically is still in the blockchain if you DIG, but how many people will dig, or know how? This can be like your delisting you referenced with google.
However, this is totally open source. Nothing is stopping any of us that can code or want to learn to code from writing a variation of steemit that unearths that stuff.
The websites steemit, busy.org, chainbb, esteem, etc are themselves centralized. The blockchain (e.g. storage and file system) is decentralized.
So if they ever do attack this project they could take down steemit. Yet that is not destroying the data or the blockchain. It is open source and we could have another site up in very short time. That is much like someone walking into your house to smash your TV to stop the signal going through the air (back when we still did VHF/UHF) when all that really did is delay you until you found and tuned in another TV.
Yes, we both seem to like lengthy responses, when communication is chunked it just seems to work better for me that way. I did read between the lines there a bit that I should perhaps be formulating some of my longer replies into stand-alone posts, which is a really good idea. I don't generally know when I start a reply how long it will become.
Your insight into how the blockchain here works is really useful for me. Unfortunately I never had more programming than a bit of basic and c+ way way back in high school, and most people not even that. That is why I mentioned that for most people, very simple forms of data suppression are quite effective.
I have been reading valued-customer's "Steemit and the End of the World" series, and he has made some good points. One I raised in a reply was that any random oligarch with an NGO (Soros anyone?) agenda could buy a few million worth of steemit and staff it with a cyber downvote squad to suppress alternative narratives. This touches on the downvotes for opinions you mentioned, and I see that Steemit still has some development ahead of it. Nevertheless I am happy to have taken the plunge and be on ship.
Yes, that can and likely will happen at some point.
The only HOPE there is that purchasing so much steem drives the value of all the steem those of us that already have it up. You could power down. Such activities of down voting would likely drive some people away and cause steem to drop. You can wait for it to drop and buy more with what you powered down.
Also it is easier in the blockchain to PROVE they are doing that, and if need be to group counter up against such activities.
That said it's a pretty new world here... with it will come new problems we haven't even experienced yet.