"...I envisage that the "scientific front-end" we want on Hive won't auto-conceal (i.e. censor) content merely because of downvotes."
Science publishing is all about money. Grants flow to those that publish, and the ability to censor facts dispositive of ideologies, and interpose fake news, is perhaps the signal feature of the extant totalitarian technocratic tyranny being imposed globally. Any front end only rides on the base layer, and Hive is a pure plutocracy. You can prevent the greying out of posts in a front end, but you cannot eliminate flags that require nothing more than stake to fly.
Hive has capabilities latent within it that enable it to become a governance mechanism for voluntarist communities, both geographically localized and dispersed. However, the financialization of it's features have produced #trending and the previously mentioned user retention failure, perhaps the worst in the industry. No one supports eliminating the burgeoning censorship of published research that increasingly eliminates factual scientific information, even as history itself is being purged by scouring the internet of historical facts, and discouraging the publication of scientific fraud that today comprises the bulk of peer reviewed papers in even the most respected journals, just as Goolag's Gemini has been so deranged by it's training that it all but refuses to produce an image of a white man, and replaces historical actors with various flavors of racially preferred peoples, more than I, but the facility with which promotion and discouragement of content, including peer reviewed research, by nothing more than money will be a hazard you will need to navigate.
I hope to encourage you to succeed in this endeavor, and not misapprehend the real impediments to success as have so many marketing efforts before that have caused them to crash and burn without achieving anything they set out to do. Political ideologues control immense pools of capital, not only on Hive, but globally, and you will be sadly mistaken if you just assume they won't deploy it to suppress information on Hive. They have been since 2016, and aren't about to stop now.
Edit: hiding content behind a click is indeed censorship, but it is not the only form of censorship on Hive. The Canadian Truckers that protested Canada's tyrannical government suffered the seizure of the bank accounts. Financial encomiums encourage content authors, and financial deprivation discourages them. Censorship is any suppression of speech, and flags certainly constitute censorship. It is flags that have driven off ~1m Hive users since 2016, silencing all those voices that were once here posting content.
Why do you assume that votes (up- or down-, doesn't matter) by random internet users would even be shown on the front-end? Is there anything else but post-rewards on your mind when you think about hive?
I don't. I point out that front ends can display some or all votes, or not, can take action reflecting some or all votes, or not. But, they cannot shield content from votes up and down.
Censorship operates by any mechanism that affects creators. Whether double tapping to the back of the head, or sneering at them during company trust building exercises, and financial stimuli is a critically sensitive value to creators. I point out that Canada censored truckers honking in Canada to protest tyranny by seizing bank accounts of supporters of that protest that sent them money for maple syrup for their pancakes.
Whether or not the votes are displayed on the front end isn't material to whether research is censored when published to Hive. What matters is what creators, in this case scientific researchers, gain financially from publishing their research. Research that is contraindicated by specific ideologies will be flagged by ideologues on Hive, which is shown by >1M former users badmouthing Hive across the cryptosphere today.
That's what I said, and that is not regarding whether up or down votes are shown on front ends, but whether those votes incentivize or discourage publishing content financially.
To render research publishing subject to the influence of opinion flags will further compromise the integrity of researchers, not reduce the noxious influence of stake on scientific research. My point is that to benefit scientific research by securing researchers from censorship will require insulating them from the influence of ideologues that fly opinion flags on Hive, and front ends can't do that.
Edit: I neglected your second question.
I do not use Hive tokens as money, to insulate myself from censorship on Hive. The vast majority of users that came to the platform have abandoned it because they sought to use Hive tokens as money which they expected to receive as author rewards for content they published on Hive. When those rewards were flagged away by ideologues with large stakes on Hive, >1M of them left the platform angry that censorship afflicted them through that vector.
There are 3-4k users on Hive today, and they are resistant to that censorship. That is less than .5% of all users that came to Hive to publish content and receive author rewards. I do keep that in mind when I consider Hive as a platform and society of creators, as I am only here because I have resisted that censorship, and most people do not.
You sound like a broken record. We are not planning to incentivize scientists with hive rewards. We might even set a 100% beneficiary for the project. Our users will not see up- or downvotes, or even comments, by random hive users. If you're not a qualified scientist, you'll be invisible to them.
And, just for the record: There is no censorship on hive.