As this world continues to drift more and more into censorship and centralization, Hive might be one of the lights in the dark; a bastion of true decentralized community & friendship.
That may be the mythology, or maybe even the goal of Hive - but it is FAR from what is actually offered here, where a few folks (azircon, altleft, curangel, acidyo, ocd being some of the main ones) actively attack, down-vote, and do everything they can to make this place just as censored as FB or Twitter.
Just because it isn't centralized Hard Censorship (straight deleting posts & accounts) doesn't make it any less of the central control (stake) driving people (creators & consumers) away from the platform, and showing that all that matters here is kissing the ass of whales.
Luckily, there's still a few whales with principles here, but it seems like they're all going more and more inactive, or leaving the platform completely.
I only recommend Hive to folks interested in playing Splinterlands or throwing out their art/music - as it is most certainly not a place for journalism, research, or others wanting to push the conversation and get away from censorship.
It's unfortunate, and I was definitely among the hopeful when we forked from Steem, but it's become clear that while the chain is more (economically) alive than it was under StInc, it has also given up any real pretense of being a decentralized or censorship-free/resistant platform.
What you said here, I couldn't have said it better. I wanted to add that just the fact that posts can be hidden here by downvotes (even though they are not deleted) is already a form censorship of information oppression. I think Dan's thesis was that the community would be able to monitor harmful content (I would call this decentralized censorship). I think his thesis was the more decentralized downvotes are the less it looks like censorship. He did not realize at the time that because stake is centralized because a small % of the population owns a portion of the wealth , big downvotes are more centralized. This platform might be better than 1 govern body being able to censor, but still the censorship power is in the power of the wealthy.
Precisely!
The funny thing is that, in general, these masses of conspiracy theorists and the whales, orcas, and dolphins that support them are in favor of free speech and prefer to challenge someone's ideas rather than simply attacking them.
That means that the malicious down-votes (those not targeting fraud, plagiarism, violence, etc.) pretty much exclusively come from one end of the pool... and for the "equalization" of down-votes to occur would just mean a whole lot less rewards for all sorts of creators - and even more centralization of stake for the whales.
Great point! So free speech is great, until a whale or curation group doesn't like it.
HIVE!D