pawsdog, I appreciate your attempt at even-handedness and civility with Mr. BS. But I believe all this discussion is just a symptom of a much larger problem.
Steemit is portrayed as a "decentralized" social platform with no one acting as an authoritarian controller. It appears this statement is not entirely true. Steemit has a flaw in its design in that it gives enormous power to certain members to destroy other members' posts with a click of the mouse. In this case, the destroyer is a self-appointed tyrant with a lot of power who thinks he knows best what is good and bad and seeks to obliterate others' ideas and information just for sport and profit. This is not what I consider to be a "decentralized" non-authority system. Mr. BS has become the authority.
Every system needs rules in place to protect the integrity of the system. The flaw in the current Steemit system was put in place by the creators of the system. It is a management problem that lies solely in the hands of the dev team. If that dev team doesn't care or has abandoned Steemit and moved on to other things, then Steemit will eventually become a place for fascistic tyrants to exercise and protect their power by destroying other legitimate members. Eventually, the system will fall apart and be relegated to the dust bin of history.
Haejin provides extremely useful and valuable information to his followers. As such, he should be compensated for his contribution to the members. If someone doesn't like what he does, they can either down vote or not consume his content. But a single down vote should not be designed to destroy or eliminate a post.
If Haejin decides to leave Steemit and go private, I will certainly abandon Steemit and follow him to his new platform. I suspect many of his followers will do the same. I will also sell all my holdings in Steem, and give serious thought to selling all of my bitshares and EOS. If Steemit has this type of serious flaw, it diminishes my confidence in the future of bitshares and EOS.
If Mr. BS or his minions don't like what I said, too bad. They can rant and rave till they're blue in the face, and they can destroy my posts if they want. I refuse to live in fear of a tyrant!
Your opinion is welcome here and I am glad that your took the time to share it and honored that I had opportunity to read it. I just wrote a post that tends to cover most of the issues you mentioned. As this thread seems to be getting long Join me here: https://steemit.com/steem/@pawsdog/join-me-in-discussion-to-build-a-better-platform-pawdog That said in that thread let us leave BS at the door and talk about the platform and improvements lest it could be squashed. I will keep it non specific over there so as we can have a constructive debate..
I think this is the reality of the anarcho-capitalist wet dream that steem represents to some. I don't want to go into an anti-AC rant, as I will get buried in a tonne of shit. But this is the reality of unfettered capitalism. The rich get richer and the poor get more exploited. Thankfully, there does seem to be a significant left libertarian (perhaps Chomsky's term of 'libertarian socialism' is the best moniker) influence here, so there are efforts by some of the other big stake holders to work to reduce the inequality gap for the freedom benefit of all.