'published' implies full access alongside other published items. If I publish a book via a publisher, I am not going to accept it being put behind a hidden door in the shop's bookshelf just because someone else decides it should be because they have more money than me.
False analogy, you don't pay for your content to be presented in a shop, you don't get to decide how the content is curated, if it's curated as low quality and it's replaced with a button that warns, don't read this it's shit, will waste your time, and upon clicking the button the content is presented it obviously cannot be censored anymore.
That's all well and good in theory, but it's not 'the community' as some kind of perfect, altruistic and balanced entity.
Nobody was saying it's perfect, or balanced or it has to be, as all those judgements are made strictly subjectively, your definition of perfect is not my definition of perfect or balance.
What is actually occurring is that those with the most money have the capacity to limit the reach of specific posts and publishers with impunity.
There are many factors that you don't account for, such a broad sweeping statement on what they could do doesn't say anything.
The decision is currently not based on merit, but rather on wallet size.
So what?
If 40+ people in the community decide that something should not be hidden, it may make no difference because one single voter with more wallet size disagrees.
Yes, that is still not a valid concern or point or reason to call it censoring, people can curate content, people with a lot of vests and steem power have more say than others over curating content, these are easy to understand things, that aren't problematic.
Democracy doesn't work that way, oligarchy does.
Oligarchy, this is a system of government now? Steem is decentralized, obviously it's not an oligarchy because it cannot bestow power onto others that others cannot themselves have. In other words, it's not one account one vote, yes, and what is your point? This isn't an oligarchy by a long shot.
Your position here smacks, ironically, of a communist dictator who decrees that 'the people have spoken' when in truth it was actually just one individual speaking who holds an unbalanced amount of power in the system.
This is your opinion, based on the fallacy that steem was created as one vote or equal share, it wasn't.
Yes, it is possible for the rest of the community to rally around those who are unfairly treated, but the system itself contains no specific facility or that and that is why I suggested to include one in my post on the topic.
What facility is missing?
I am aware that Dan has specifically included some kind of conflict resolution system into EOS, so it is obviously not just me that has a concern - though I don't yet know the details of that.
Yes people abusing flags is an issue, but it's not something that requires anything special, the tools are already here to deal with it.
As already stated, marketing theory and practise makes clear that visibility is king in many cases. Information system theory shows the same in terms of human- computer interaction. The human visual cortex is virtually hardwired in many people to be drawn to shiny things - sad but true.
Just because some things are more visible than others, doesn't mean those less visible aren't available. It's communist mentality to say that "they can only be so shiny and all must be only so shiny". It's irrelevant that people get drawn to shiny things, that still doesn't make the content not available or censored. There is a distinct difference between something not being available, and something being available.
They do literally lose money since payouts are directly reduced due to downvotes, as I understand - they also get less payout due to less visibility and thus less downvotes. That's fine for validly downvoted posts, but that is not what I am highlighting.
They don't lose something that was never theirs. They get exactly what the payout is, nobody is stealing their payout, people can vote against the post, or curate it as not worthy of those rewards it has (the post itself, not the author), and since the voting is still open there is no logic behind saying that they lost money, they didn't gain as much money or any money from that content, not they lost money. The content was still getting curated, you're not entitled to only applause and reward, people can chose to jeer and boo at you too, and you cannot do anything about that, short of not expressing yourself if you don't want to give people the chance to jeer and boo at you, so if you want to make money you have to risk that not everyone will reward you, and you might not make money from your content, regardless of how good or how much work you put into it. You don't have a choice over how people curate your content, saying they lost money is saying that they lost reviews because people gave them one or no star out of 5.