It's a really good story.
But there's more isn't there?
You saw it yourself...
Perhaps their story should be included as well? After all, real people hardly count as collateral damage and those people are forever silenced. All of us together have barely had any effect fixing it despite trying all day, burning through our voting power in the process and leaving us unable to curate good content. Turns out our literally thousands of upvotes has no effect if the wrong person downvotes you once. That's now our message we send to the world.
Tens of thousands of dollars a day spent by the community in advertising to attract them. They will go home to facebook, reddit, twitter, the news media etc and let their family and friends know what a warm reception they were given which was our intent in the first place right? Even now there are whispers on the wind that steemit is being called the world's first "antisocial network". Watch the steem price when that one catches fire. :( I was saddened reading that one this morning. To see it though you have to take effort and actually read what is being censored.
Keep in mind that on the entire internet, we now have a place where one person can censor and silence another person forever... but only here. Now that power is in the hands of bots too. Would have made more sense to my mind to just exempt bots from having any power at all for voting up or down. We all agreed to the criteria on this, right? There are just some of us who missed the memo and don't know where to look, to know what is allowed to post now? Would be helpful if that link were published, I'll do what I can to make sure noobies know about that criteria.
This post has made me realize that I was wrong to try and solve the bot problem, by talking to their builders getting all but @anyx and a couple others to agree to a code of conduct and respecting leashcodes in exchange for giving them something more useful and productive to put their efforts towards than griefing the system.
Sorry to be negative, maybe it will all work out fine.
Think I'll just go back to building tools and libraries in an effort to make steemit a more fun place. :D
Good story @cryptogee, but maybe use the trending status on this post to bring attention to the victims so maybe someone who matters will care about those newcomers? I'm out of voting power from trying to help the victims or else I would vote you up.