You bring up good points, these are things I end up discussing quite a lot. They are valid objections in my opinion.
But they are answerable.
1 ) from a rewards point of view, this is the simplest case. until payout, there is a completely open system wide vote on the rewards to be granted to each post, as a proportion of the rewards pool, with each voter enabled to vote to strength according their stake.
Both up and down votes are permitted. No one can take away rewards, as rewards are set at payout time and delivered to the rewarded account. In the seven day window between posting and payout (apart from the last few hours) the voting is open and active.
It is a failing of the main Steem UI steemit.com for setting the tone on both (a) down votes as flags, and (b) encouraging users to see pending rewards as guaranteed rewards, i.e. that their rewards can only track upwards. I've written about both many times and at length before, but that's the gist and is very straight forward.
2 ) posts which have pending or final rewards of zero or less are represented in the steemit.com UI (and all the main others I think) as less visually drawn attention to, collapsed etc. All that is required to show them is a click. An additional click is then needed to show the images.
I don't deny that this has a big effect on whether people choose to read the posts. @valued-customer successfully argued against me that this is not censorship, it is. It is however very very light. There can be scales of censorship and I would not consider this to be Censorship with a capital C. That is the so-called institutional censorship, total blocking of content, deletion, book burning, prohibition from writing or publishing, even imprisonment.
What we have here is better viewed as ordering and prioritization. It is a UI decision that's similar to putting porn in a cover which obscures the cover. This is a real practice. Would you say that this porn is censored? Kind of is the best answer. It's still possible to get, the hurdle is minor. But does it put some people of viewing it at all? Undoubtedly.
Again this is down to the UI. Don't like it? Make your own. The actual blockchain doesn't do this, or any form of censorship. It's important to make that distinction. It can't be more important.
3 ) this to be is a red herring. We can't peer inside people's minds to gauge their motivation. We stick to the facts and assume nothing.
Do you think the current downvote function have no negative side to it, and that it cannot and is not being misused?
The negative side is that if someone with a lot of SP want to remove your rewards they can. The balance is that you can buy stake to counteract that yourself. If you can't afford it, you can appeal to other large stakeholders you may be able to go by social means to embarrass them or enlist some people to counter it.
That's just from a practical point of view though. Systematically this is the hard reality of Steem, decisions are upheld by stake.
I did not plan to go into a lengthy exchange on this topic when made the first reply. Neither have I spent much time organizing my thoughts on the subject, as this is the first time I put this topic into text or words. I appreciate your response and engagement, I can see that you are really looking for solutions.
(1) I’m not sure if I’m able to see the full picture of how this would significantly differ from the current system in practice, but I find your proposal interesting. I agree that eh GUI on Steemit has an influence.
(2) To clarify, I was not referring to visibility in any of the “trending” lists. I was purely talking about the hiding of content. I know nothing is removed, but as you also point out people are less likely to open and read greyed out posts. When it comes to censorship, yes, there is various ways to do censor with various levels of impact. I strongly would argue that one cannot redefine the definition based on who is censoring, what is being censored and if you support it, or to what degree. Censorship is censorship. Towards the effect of greyed out posts, I would say it goes in a close relationship to conditioning. Greyed out material is commonly associated with a long list of disruptive content, and in general something strongly negative. The more people are conditioned, or accustomed if you will, to such expectation, the larger is the number of people that will ignore it. Personally, I would expect this to be a quite efficient form for censorship.
I would like to try add another angle to your description of this as “ordering and prioritization”:
Take for instance, my replies in this post. Seconds after I post, a bot is automatically downvoting my post. We are therefore talking seconds (3 seconds – checked blockchain) of visibility before its greyed. That means its is put at this disadvantage from the very beginning, not a calculated average after 7 days. Much of the decision whether or not the content is worth reading is taken by the first voter (in this case a bot you can’t beat).
Perhaps my posts could be used as an example to ask this. Do you (anyone whom would open and read the post =)) think these posts/replies deserve a downvote?
While on the topic I would like to thank you deeply for your upvote, persons, but as you can see it was all eaten up by the initial auto-downvote on my post.
(3) I might not have been clear on this point, as I cannot imagine that there is anything to disagree upon here =). I’m simply advocating free speech and that is already covered by the fact that we all are allowed to comment on whatever and to whomever we will. We do not need a downvote not upvote for that. The “tools” I’m referring to is point 1 and 2, but it might have been unclear. Wanted to keep it short.
In addition to removing rewards (which is not what I oppose), negative sides I would say is the hiding of content (strongly enhanced by the used of bots that shoots blindly). When set on auto fire, it have a strong discouraging effect on the creation of new content. The main targets for many of the bots, will likely just shrug of the inconvenience, make a new account and continue on. Along with creating resentment which often only encourage the behavior the bot creator presumably was trying to counter.