r/Bitcoin and r/BTC are Both Guilty of Censorship + Why Steemit is a Better Platform for Moderate Discussion

Ever since the censorship by Theymos on r/bitcoin started to go overboard, many sought other places not owned and operated by him to talk about bitcoin. Roger Ver created a forum at bitcoin.com, and also r/btc calling everyone to join a society of censorship free bitcoin news. However this is not the case. They are both terrible places to discuss bitcoin because each uses their own way to promote their own agendas. They are literally the extremes of two different sides and Roger continues to claim that there is no censorship on r/btc. I want to talk about each one and why they are both terrible places for the moderate to read about bitcoin news. Also I want to talk about why Steemit is a much better place for such discussions to take place.

First I want to talk about r/bitcoin which is the older subreddit and gets more traffic because of the name. It is owned primarily by Theymos who also owns bitcointalk.org. Theymos has been around in bitcoin since almost the beginning and started the forum and the subreddit for ideas and news to be spread. Theymos has the ideology that aligns with the developers in bitcoin core, so he believes any talk about forks are considered off topic. The reason he believes they are off topic is because in his mind if bitcoin forks the forked chain is an altcoin. While many disagree, Theymos holds is stance against this. Over time, censorship moved to straight out deleting posts that discussed ideas that he didn’t like to flat out banning people that called out his censorship. There is no doubt that r/bitcoin has a heavy amount of censorship and it is in the traditional, removing people and posts, way.

The r/btc subreddit doesn’t often remove posts or people, but ultimately they are practicing another form of censorship, which is idea suppression. Just because the mods aren’t literally removing posts doesn’t mean that censorship isn’t going on. While r/btc was created to counter r/bitcoin, it still suffers from much of the same problems. Horde mentality downvoting anything that might be good or reasonable criticism or ideas simply because they go against what people there think. The downvote is supposed to be used for situations where conversation cant take place, not because you disagree with the way someone thinks. In addition there have been reports and relatively good proof that a large amount of bots are being used on r/btc to suppress comments or posts. There is no proof that the moderators are doing it, but regardless, they don’t actively try to remove the bots and they end up suppressing any sort of moderate view.

Both subreddits are terrible for any sort of moderate civilized discussion because of the way reddit is created. I could make 5 accounts and single handedly affect the discussion on most subreddits I wanted to. People who have click farms have even taken advantage of this and sell upvote bots for very cheap. With people making so much on the rise of bitcoin, many have used that money to push their own agendas. Reddit allows a way to make a sort of social Sybil attack that is harder to do on a platform like Steemit, where you have something to risk.

On Steemit because our accounts are weighted and the amount of votes is precious to the user, downvoting comments hardly ever happens unless it is very offensive. Weighing votes makes Sybil attacks impossible across multiple accounts. Your account spread between 10 different user names, still has the same amount of power behind it. The slight problem that does arise is that the richest people can pay for their ideas, but even then, they can only do so much before their steem power goes to 0. It makes it more possible for moderate discussion to take place this way. I hope that in the future Steemit can pull more of the discussion from reddit because there is a benefit to actually seeing how many people believe in something.