I've noticed you speaking about Hive as a free-speech platform again.. excuse me if I missed something somewhere - but what has changed since the last battles which demonstrated there was a few at the top attempting to soft censor and degrade the reputation of anyone that spoke up about current issues in a non-mainstream way?
Not trying to be antagonistic - actually hopeful. I really want something like the ideal of what I considered Hive represented from the beginning to exist.
Great question! Hive is not yet perfect for free speech, that is certainly true - and it's clear that some of the most important pieces of the free speech puzzle are still incomplete here. However, if you listen to the developments being made by the various Hive projects towards support for self governing layer 2 communities, you might conclude that some of the most important parts are not far away.
Even though I do still agree that there is a major sense of unfairness in the current landscape when it comes to 'the few' being able to remove rewards and soft censor authors via downvotes - it is also true that anyone can launch their own front end for Hive and ensure total visibility for their content, relatively easily - untouched by downvotes. So really, the problem is not exactly censorship, but is more of a problem of 'reach' and the limitation of it for some users. This is precisely the same problem that we face on X/Twitter, where they claim that free speech rights are not 'the right to be heard'. Hive does not yet solve the problem of reach adequately, but it is better than X/Twitter and all centralised Web 2 solutions.
With the intelligent development of layer 2 communities, we will all be much better placed to grow audiences in whichever way we prefer, with tokens that we direct ourselves and free to use our own ingenuity to overcome problematic downvoters. Even without these features we are still able to virtually guarantee that posts will be served by the blockchain and visible through whichever sites want to publish them.
It's sad to say, but the state of free speech on web 2 sites is so terrible that it doesn't take much to beat them. Hive is already beating them, even with the potential to downvote posts. In it's current state, the problems stem from financial inequality in the wider world, resulting in an imbalanced downvoting 'game' playing out here. However, we can address this with changes to the core blockchain code, developing layer 2 communities and other strategies.
It may seem unfair to have to put in so much effort to guarantee our own free speech and in some ways it is - however, it's also true that while I personally do know that 'some things in life really are free', there is also truth to the sentiment behind the phrase 'there's no free lunch'. The truth is that, in the context of social media, unless we put our own energy/resources into a project, there will generally always be someone who will be seeking to exploit and profit from us. Hive does at least provide the tools to correct this to those who invest sufficiently. I remain confident that these problems will be more completely resolved soon.