"...1.6 million other accounts..."
LOL Half a million of them are socks, and the rest have been flagged off the platform. All that's left are us, ~3k actual users as far as I can tell. Maybe 10k max if we count folks that stop by once a year. I was told years ago by a guy that he had 10k accounts all by himself. He's still here, so I bet he's got more like 100k today.
"If you haven’t noticed..."
I was the asshole. Quietly, to myself.I confess I considered your bottery anathema and for that reason utterly ignored you for years. Only after we interacted when I vehemently advocated you stop flagging @joepublic and I was astonished not only to not be flagged for doing it, but you actually did stop, did my misconceptions about you slowly begin to eat away at my hubris. Then, despite my stubborn pigheadedness, against my will, suspicion that I did not know everything about you I needed to know and had misjudged you began to grow until I eventually had to concede
Being sharply corrected by your failure to be the asshole I thought you to be, I have very gradually realized you are ordinary people, and actually have principles. For so crushing my conceit I owe you a debt of gratitude.
Don't tell anyone, but I vote your witness now, and have for some time.
"I am not the police of this platform..."
You take on a lot of that burden because of your principles, however, and I have seen you relent on opinion flagging in the above mentioned matter, as well as being flagged yourself. The old aphorism that free speech is fine until you shout fire in a theater has this caveat: it's a crime not to warn people when the theater is afire. Free speech is literally a matter of life and death.
Hive has lost ~1M users since we started here (I also got here in 2017). Not only does that deprecate your stake, but also might threaten your life and freedom. This world needs free speech so we can shout fire when the theater is burning, and tens of millions of people have already died because of censorship of factual medical information that convinced them to submit to experimental medical tests of devices that occasionally have lethal side effects. I am certain sure that censorship's going to get worse, as will the harms from it, unless we do something about it.
Hive can do something about censorship, but we have to support folks that are speaking out, people that dissent, even if they're wrong, because without criticism and argument we can't learn we are wrong - as I learned I was about you. I donate 1/4 of my author rewards to @por500bolos and several other creators because censorship must be opposed and dissent supported or worse things than have already happened will happen. We need all the content creators we can get, and he's being deliberately driven from the platform maliciously.
I don't want any Hive Police, and I want HW ended. I want Hive to police Hive, for better or worse. You are more aware than most the community came together to flag bidbots into the grave, so you know the community can do the flagging that needs doing, with proper incentives and code that enables it. You also have been flagged harder than anyone I know, so you know what it takes to persevere against injustice, as does @por500bolos. You have substantial stake to upvote unjustly flagged creators with, to counter flags and make them whole. You are highly respected on Hive, #8 of the witnesses.
You have stuck with Hive despite being flagged for a year, so you have grit and believe in the platform. You have reach here I can never dream of, and can get more folks to back us up. I believe you can help make opinion flagging end - if you actually agree that it is wrong. My understanding of your statements here is that you do. I know there's a lot of people here on Hive that will back you up if you make a move to champion free speech.
I act to defend creators against censorship, but I can't do it alone (LOL I can hardly do anything at all). I don't want you to do that against your better judgement, or unwillingly. I want you to do it to defend your property, your rights, and your life, because censorship is a threat to all of them, and everyone else, too. We all need free speech. I urge you to revive @freezepeach, with a delegation, or talking to @r0nd0n to see what it would take, to help Hive become what it should be: freedom from fear of censorship for good people that speak the truth as best they know it. You can stand behind that cause and never regret it.
