Firstly, to avoid any confusion it is very important that we take a second to explain what soft-censorship on the Steemit Platform is.
Question – What is soft-censorship on Steemit?
Answer – Flagging (or soft-censorship) on Steemit allows people who have amassed large amounts of Steem to nullify the votes of dozens if not hundreds of other users, and change a posts potential rewards from:
$X ← to → $0.
It also simultaneously causes the flagged post to be hidden (or dithered out). If you've ever run across a post that says click to reveal, it means that post has either been downvoted, flagged, or soft-censored by another user who for whatever reason doesn't want people to see what you have written.
This happened to me today by a Steemit developer.
This is how my comment looks, after it has been censored:
And below is what my comment looked like before it was maliciously censored by the Steemit Developer called @sneak.
"If you think downvoting a post on the internet is a violation of the NAP, then you have a lot more reading to do, and we have nothing further to discuss. - sneak"
I called it a spiritual violation of the NAP. You performed an action that resulted in a type of soft-censorship. Not only that, had you not performed that action, those potential rewards that were amassing would not have been diverted back to the reward pool.
Think of it this way, I could legally sleep with your girlfriend, but it wouldn't be morally right. Yes, technically I did nothing illegal, but the metaphysics of those types of actions are very harmful.
Legally, the U.S. government could drain every bank account in the United States and pay it all back to the Federal Reserve Bank. The reason they can do this, is because every FRN on the planet has been loaned into existence by the Fed. All of the money belongs to them, so they can take it all back whenever they want.
However, the moral implications, and the consequences of those kinds of actions would be devastating. Basically, you’re fucking up people's experience, and although it might not be censorship in the technical sense, 95% of the people who use the platform are going to internalize and perceive your actions as both theft, and censorship.
Side note: I noticed when you click the flag button, the parameters (or guidelines) for flagging are no longer present. When did that change? Or do they only show that once?
Also, did you find one of Clarity's demonstrably false statements yet? I think it's quite possible that you are abusing the spirit of the flagging tool. End result, if too many people engage in this type of behavior, people will see Steemit as a platform that engages in censorship, and the platform will bleed out just like all the others are.
So you Devs need to figure it out, cause we're on top of it. All of the intricacies with respect to the technicality of whether or not it's theft, or whether or not it's censorship isn't going to change the perceptions that you impress on people when the platform allows for things that so closely resemble theft, and censorship.
At some point, when it reaches extremes people will simply-and-universally boycott out of disgust. I don't want to see that happen, and I'm sure that nobody else does either.
That's my two cents, take it, leave it, flag it, stick it in your pipe and smoke it. Do what you do.
I'd advise you to try not awaken the giant, but I think you already have. The Streisand effect had already taken hold, and even if you bury this comment. It's going to echo thunderously throughout the platform!
I am the butterfly today!
Questions for the Reader
Are the gains, worth the soft-censorship?
Will soft-censorship modify the way you behave?
How does Steemit soft-censorship make you feel?
Should I hold a MEME contest about Steemit Censorship?
Did you learn about Steemit's soft-censorship before or after joining?
Tell us what you think by sounding off in the comment section below!
It may take me some time before I can reply because I have used lots of bandwidth over the last couple of days. However, if this post in any way resonated with you, then kindly consider upvoting, and maybe even resteeming it.
However, be warned. Do so knowing full and well that their may be consequences for your actions, as their are snowflakes in powerful places who wield whamhammers, and they must feel so proud and good to be Steemit's version of big brother.
Special thank you to @haejin for uncensoring this post!
Take a look @haejin's site to learn more about crypto trends!
Hi,
I can say that I wasn't aware of the power of downvoting, and flagging until after I started using the platform. It quickly took some of the joy out of posting. It felt like weird because being that it is a sort of public forum it felt weird that I had to be so careful while just sharing my thoughts. I've considered buying Steem in order to obtain a bit of power myself but my wallet is way to low to make a difference. Good luck moving forward. I believe in you!
Thank you @senseier2. I feel ya, and think that it caught most people unaware. It's certainly not a feature to be bragged about in promotional videos, that's for sure. Good luck in your efforts as well, I believe in you too!
Here we go again
I plan on organizing a contest soon, there will be only 1 winner,
and that winner will be awarded 10.00 Steem backed dollars.
Consider this a heads up if your interested in that sort of thing.
It will be a MEME contest about exposing Steemit censorship.
I'll gauge the success of that contest when it is over, and if it is
unsuccessful. I'll power down, and do even more contests.
I may end up dedicating 250 Steem to these various contests.
This will basically be an advertising campaign, in hopes that
Steemit will ultimately do the right thing.
If they don't do the right thing. I'll simply have a blast holding
the contests, burn through all of my Steem and leave the platform.
knowing that I fought hard and well for freedom of speech here.
I think I was reading somewhere yesterday that there is some confusion over the fact that this person is in fact a Steemit developer. Can you confirm?
Jeffrey Paul or @sneak is the guy on the right in this video.
He is the "Lead Technical Program Manager", or apparently
whatever he chooses to call himself.
As long as the meme is not racist or insulting, I fully support!
Good point, I will have to specify that in the rules of the contest!
@haejin, here is 'the contest' I put together. I clicked on submit too fast without clarifying the rules which resulted in someone posting a meme about yourself.
I then updated the rules to reflect that I will not accept entries that involve other Steemians, because I want to target the idea of censorship in general.
I used his negative post about you, as a teaching moment to try and explain why downovting anyone's post (when not in self-defense) is wrong. This is part of the FFF-SOS Creedo, rules that we good Steemians tend to live by.
We would certainly encourage you to adopt the creed, if it is something that resonates with you. Other than that, I simply wanted to inform you of the status of the contest. Can we still count on your full support?
Thank you for your consideration!
@thoughts-in-time (FFF-SOS patient zero)
P.S. I also noticed a post of yours, which suggested that berniesanders might be the same person behind randowhale, and seeing as how I have 300 steem delegated to randowhale I decided to send him an open-letter in the form of a petition to see if he would be willing to stop reward raping, and or censoring other people's posts.
I'll give him a week or so to respond before making any decisions on whether not to un-delegate from him. Hopefully in the future, you can all come to some kind of ceasefire. I think these wars, and downvoting in general is really hurting the morale of the platform. Yet, it's perfectly acceptable in my book when done in self-defense!
Excellent man. I feel I can learn a lot from ya, it's actually amazing how events like this can bring people together. In a holistic sense I want to thank @sneak for his actions because they result in people being able to discern much better who on Steemit is a genuine seeker and who isn't, which helps me build my tribe much faster.
That said, the evidence for a censorship case is strong in my view, and being at the Steemit dev team I am sure he will be able to endure some memes coming his way. Especially if they stay on point and do not take this event to the other extreme, we have to remain factual and not become an angry mob. That said, there are more and more good reasons lately to assume that something with Steemit is not quite right. Something behind the scenes is off, no idea what it is yet.
We can only find that out if we keep at it, the swarm will not be silenced anymore, we have experienced too much in the last decade to not pay attention to these sorts of things, especially considering the people who left the other platforms and came to Steemit in the first place.
Needless to say when this story reaches 100k more Steemit users there will eventually have to be an explanation. This is not word-of-mouth-backroom-deal government, this is a public blockchain - where anyone willing can find out all there is to find out about what happened here, who did what and how it all connects.
Thank you @paradigmprospect, I'm sure I will be learning allot from you too! The contest won't necessarily be focused at him per se, but there won't be a rule excluding that. I've just gotta make the rules in such a way where people focus on doing memefare in a positive way. I definitely wouldn't be selecting any vile memes as the winner, and saying something like that up front should be enough to discourage those types of submissions. I agree with you though, something seems off.
dude, the quality of people's comments on your threads give testimony to their well-meaning and compassionate nature. I claim to be able to recognize a good floor when I get there. And you people are definitly my crew.
People with larger vocabulary don't need to throw open insults around. Likewise, people with pressing issues on their minds who have enough social experience can deliver their pain without causing more inadvertantly.
Agreed, not focussing on someone particular would be a great idea. You know that contest could become a real thing on Steemit. Just let's not hope for upvotes ahahaha.
I shall refrain from commenting now, you must have a really busy time this week ;)
thanks for all your hard work and getting more freethinkers to come out of the background. There is nothing better for finding the crew than when an issue is facing the community, no matter how aweful it at first seems.
Amen to that, thanks for your support!
This post is absolutely ridiculous. Flagging was built into STEEM for the very purposes of people disagreeing? Have you even read the white paper? Do you understand why flagging is important to the platform?
Literally BUILT IN FOR A REASON.......
Those reasons according to the creators of STEEM? Well, just check the prompt when you go to flag someone and it states the reasons. One of which is simple. "Disagreement on rewards."
Welcome to a decentralized platform where anybody can do anything. You can post whatever you want. Up vote whatever you want, and flag whatever you want....
That is kind of the whole point..... If you are getting flagged, there is probably a reason. Figure out the reason and make sense of it. If it doesn't make logical sense, ask for help from others.
It isn't a hard concept to wrap your head around. It's literally here for a big reason......
Thanks for your comment @biasnarrative. I do understand that downvoting was built into the Steem blockchain. However, the collapsing of flagged posts, and hiding of posts, and dithering effects that Steemit has added as a destructive flourish can be perceived as a form of soft-censorship. I think just as Steemit has chosen to add those things, they can simply remove those after effects of flagging.
Then all they would need to do is come up with a more reasonable solution to handle spam. People don't like it when they put allot of time and effort into a post only to see it dithered out and hidden on the Steemit UI. It connotes a strong feeling that they've been censored by another Steemian. In reality on the blockchain they haven't, but on Steemit it's a different story.
Steemit can really do the right thing if they wanted to, and make this platform a much more positive place.
My suggestions are to:
I do have one more suggestion which is a bit radical, but it might prove to be an interesting experiment. Even if it was only done as a trial-run.
The benefits to this kind of thing would be that Steemit could be percieved as a platform that doesn't discourage the free flow of diverse ideas.
Also, if the post has been downvoted to 0.00 on another UI maybe Steemit could show how heavy it was downvoted in sbd and maybe show a little flag icon, so that people know it was flagged and can choose to counter it, if they please.
I think Steemit could become a much more powerful community if it's users weren't attacking each other in flag wars. All we're doing is holding each other back with that kind of nonsense. If this experiment worked on Steemit, maybe other UI's like d.tube and the like would follow suit.
I don't know how radical the implications of these changes would be, but the whole thing is an experiment anyhow. I say why not try something to create more community unity. I feel like the design of this UI is almost setup to try and create an internet civil war or something. It comes off as very divisive.
Are those ideas unreasonable, if so could you explain why? I'm still learning, and love the Steemit platform, I just think that it has the potential to be better, and lead the way by setting a good example for all the other UI's.
One more point: "Disagreement on rewards."
Lets say that someone with a vote weight of $10.00 wants to reward person (A).
Then in comes person (B) who says; fuck person (A) and downvotes -$10.00.
It really makes no sense to me, If I want to reward someone for their hard work at this or that, then why should someone else be able to interfere with that action? Can you imagine if something like that happened in real life?
Imagine that you are competing in a marathon with three prizes for the winners.
You run hard, and you run fast, and to your amazement you finish in first place. Then the second place contestant finishes the race like 10 minutes behind you, and boy are they pissed. Just as the race officials are about to reward you with your Gold medal the extremely wealthy 2nd place contestant says hold up, I disagree!
Long story short, three hour marathon complete and nothing to show for it. I don't know @biasnarrative, the whole scheme just seems so bassackwards. Steemians would be far better off simply voting for what they want, vs. voting against content they don't like to hear.
I'm sure you've heard of people bitching about reward pool rape, but what about reward rape, it's just as ludicrous. If you ask me the whole damn system seems like it's meant to get people fighting with one another. I just don't see the logic.
I could see where it might be forgivable for a whale to engage in regular reward pool rape, just so that when they wanted to reward someone, they could send it directly via steem transfer, without dealing with the hassle of downvote wars.
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
https://steemit.com/censorship/@clarityofsignal/steemit-developer-sneak-hides-two-highly-revealing-posts-related-to-verifiable-student-actors-involved-in-florida-school
Thanks for posting that cheetah. For anyone concerned you can access my soft-censored comments, and the entire context of this post in the above link. You might need to modify your screens brightness in order to see them, because when Steeemit engages in soft-censorship, it makes the posts or comments that have been soft-censored very difficult to see.
Resteemed by @resteembot! Good Luck!
Curious? Read @resteembot's introduction post
Check out the great posts I already resteemed.
ResteemBot's Maker is Looking for Work.
Continue to spread lies about me, continue to get flagged. It's that simple.
What lie did I spread about you @sneak?
This post has been soft-censored via
the flagging tool courtesy of @sneak.
@sneak the technical developer of this platform,
doesn't like it, when you say things he doesn't like.
Let it be a lesson to any of you would-be free thinkers!
In case @sneak soft-censors you too,
here's the code for the content above:
This post has been soft-censored via the flagging tool courtesy of @sneak.https://s10.postimg.org/mcawka5ft/sneak.png@sneak the technical developer of this platform, doesn't like it, when you say things he doesn't like. Let it be a lesson to any of you would-be free thinkers!Just heard about the POS called sneak flagging comments. WTF is this BS?!
Part of the Steemit platform unfortunately. Sometimes I wonder if I am regularly slipping between different parallel universes. One day I think that Steemit is censorship free. The next day it is not... Tell you what, if the Berenstains went back to the Berensteins I could totally deal with this much more easily.
I have followed you because of you standing up to this.
Not only is it very childish but it reeks of SJW activity.
When I upvoted you, @haejin upvoted at the same moment and that un-hid your post.
Thanks @haejin. I have followed you. You as well seem to be getting attacked by the same crowd of steemit bullies.
They want to destroy everyone that doesn't follow their demands.
I feel like I am fighting the 4th Reich of Hitler!
WOW who would have ever thought that there would be a Hitleresque battle going on steemit!
This flagging destroyed my reputation soon after I first got here. I am not one to back down to an asshole. I got ripped off by a vote bot!
I even confronted one asshole loan shark witness stealing by 890 percent apr loans.
Not the kind of activity that should be happening on steemit.
We all must stand up against abuse no matter who it is happening to.
let the cards fall where they may!
Thank you @iamstan, I shall follow you too!
I agree it does very much seem like
Social "just us" warrior activity.
It's sad, developers should be setting a positive example.
If they don't fix this soon, one might be forgiven for thinking
that the intention of this platform is to get people distracted,
and fighting with one another. Like they've got this flagging
mechanism and they can create cyber civil wars with it.
What sucks for me the more I dig, the more corruption and evil activity I find on steemit. There is a big group of rich corrupt evil POS here. Wow we must fight on!
What are the chances I can get some support here? I was flagged and now my rep is 11 does anyone care? It was because i supported this post!
Hello @iamstan check out my two latest posts. Join FFF-SOS I think you should write about your experience of getting censored and then post it, you could be the first person to use the FFF-SOS tag in a post!
It's a really great idea, we just need to grow our membership. If we can get the attention of some Dolphins or Whales maybe they can help to reverse the reputation hit. Building the community and spreading the idea should be paramount, if that is, if it resonates with you.
I also have a contest where I will be giving away 25.00 sbd to expose the censorship on Steemit with clever memes. At some point we will use these memes against the people who engage in blatant censorship tactics.
I already have and will continue to do so. Every time I get censored maliciously I post a meme about it. We need to discourage this behavior, it requires a public awareness campaign. Come check it out, and see if you want to participate.
Also if your reputation is more important than the fight itself. Then you might want to consider if it's worth fighting the fight at all. You can avoid the conflict and keep your head down hoping and crossing your fingers that you don't get censored. Or you can re- double your efforts and forget about reputation all together. Adapt your strategy to the new reality.
You could track every downvote he does and post a meme that reveals the reality of the situation. There are probably many different ways in which this can be addressed. I think exposing the fact that the Steemit developers engages in censorship is paramount.
As I try to figure out what happened, I got attacked now by BS and his tens of accounts on a good post I did about dicamba.
I found a search tool that lets you know the value of votes and I looked at our friend Stinc dev and he is just running all over the place downvoting/flagging like BS.
I like your idea, the problem is I make a post about being attacked and they'll swarm me and shut me down.
Looks like Steemit is worse than Facebook/Google when it comes to abuse of it's users.
Thanks for the help!
I have little power but you deserve an upvote! Keep the good fight going. My reputation was also destroyed within my first week on the platform. I wasn't aware how quickly I could be silenced.
I returned the favor and followed you!