RE: Dinner with @timcliff and @sneak at SteemFest - Discussion about Communities
For content that is not posted within a community, the user who posted the content will have moderator control over their post. Users will have the ability to hide any comments that they do not want on their blog. Hidden content will still be available on the blockchain and possibly other UIs, but they will be filtered out by Hivemind for the data that is presented on Steemit.com.
Looks like a censorship tool.
Hidden comments should be like downvoted posts: hidden yet still expandable/visible to whoever may wanna look into what the OP tried to hide. Having all traces of a comment deleted means we won't even know if a comment has been removed. There must be at least a notice on Steemit saying "comment removed" so we then know when to look on the blockchain for a hidden comment.
I believe that will be an option. Worst case scenario, someone can build a UI that shows all the censored content.
Nothing that happens on steemit.com constitutes censorship. The blockchain is immutable. The contents of this website are a private affair, and it would be censorship to restrict the editorial control that is the right of the owner of the steemit.com DNS domain name.
See relevant XKCD #1357: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Nothing obligates Steemit Inc to host anything it doesn't want to on the steemit.com website.
The blockchain does not support this functionality, and won't be updated to do so. Removal of content will be strictly UI. There will be no way to delete "all traces of a comment".
Note that every other blogging platform in the world allows the author of a post to choose what other UGC is displayed below/alongside their own writing, to their audience.
Not having feature parity here is both a disincentive to those with large audiences, as well as unfair to them - it says that "to blog on steemit, you must give equal time to every shithead who wants to place their words below yours". That's super uncompetitive as they will simply blog elsewhere that gives them that control; but also it's just unfair. If you spend years or decades building an audience, you do not owe access to that audience to any second or third party who has an opinion about you.
It's not censorship, as you can always write your response/attack post on your own blog, where your own audience (likely much smaller) can read it if they choose. Nobody is entitled to access to someone else's audience, despite what Drunk Kanye thinks.
Presently, my Serious Blogging is reserved for my own website, which I control, due to the fact that the traffic going to the permalink sees only what I choose for them to see. If they want opinions of others about my writing, they can go to those other peoples' websites. There are too many loudmouthed whiners on the internet for me to direct my readers' eyeballs to a page I do not totally control.