RE: Can You Explain Why This Post Exposing an Alleged High Profile Scammer on Steemit is Censored, Despite a Ratio of 44 Upvotes to 1 Downvote!?
i have no problem with not calling it 'censorship', but if something is hidden it is by definition now not fully available in a published format alongside the other posts.
It is fully available in published format, it just requires one press a button.
obviously, i don't make posts to steemit for them to be hidden
That's not your choice, the community curates content as they wish. Curating content affects visibility, lower curated content will be obviously further down the list than better more curated content, and that is only if you sort content by curation, if you go to the author you can see the content alongside their other content as it was published.
i personally feel that what i am posting usually will draw enough attention without me needing to add 'mystery' to it by having it hidden.
If it's hidden it's hidden, if it's not available then it has to not be available, if it's censored it has to not be available anymore. Obviously it's not any less available because the user is presented with a warning instead of the content directly.
i do though think it is justified to say that hidden posts are 'semi censored'
It's not semi-censored, it's either censored or it's not. There is no "somewhat censored". It's censored or it's not.
this though, is not the end of the issue, since the author also loses money and reputation due to the downvotes - which is a whole other dimension to the equation.
You cannot argue that they lose money when the rewards are still getting voted on, the author didn't lose money, they didn't get all the rewards they were expecting because people voted against them. The reputation is a metric that more or less is based on what others curated your account as, so if it affects reputation it's because it's their right to curate content, negatively or positively, they can give you a zero start or a one star out of 5 or 5 million, they have given their opinion.
'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.
That's all well and good in theory, but it's not 'the community' as some kind of perfect, altruistic and balanced entity. 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. The decision is currently not based on merit, but rather on wallet size. 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. Democracy doesn't work that way, oligarchy does. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.