I am only following 64 people, so when I see ten different posts about censorship resistance on the Steem blockchain it's hard to ignore. Of course, all of these posts are about Steemit censoring the @thedarkoverlord account.

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Annoyingly enough, Steemit has made the crypto news circuit again. First when STINC fired 70% of its employees, and now again with this. Seems like no one wants to report on a blockchain that actually has a working product. Seems like only FUD sharks swim these bloodied waters. Oh well, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

This is especially true for Steem because we are largely unknown. In a year when the economy is tanking and more people are entering the cryptosphere, those who remember the 70% layoff and the censorship issue will think to themselves, "Wait, what? That Steem thing is still around? But I read about it in an article titled: '20 Altcoins That Died During Crypto Winter'."

Just like Bitcoin has already died 300 times and the general public is always surprised that it's around in a year, so will Steem benefit from the same staying power. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

What will be the difference? Development. Think about how many more products we can develop here in a year or two compared to Bitcoin. They will have the Lightning Network and we will have 100 other technologies. They will be transferring money back and forth and we will be getting "paid to _____". The best part is that this process is cooperative, not competitive. We gain value from Bitcoin and they gain value from us.

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I wanted to write this post a while ago before the @thedarkoverlord account even got banned, but now everything has been said 100 times in 100 different ways. Steemit is not Steem. We are still censorship resistant. Yada Yada Yada.

Flags

Hopefully it becomes clear to Steemians that the same concept applies to downvotes. Flags are not censoring users. The Steemit front-end is censoring users. This is not a bad thing. More often than not, the censored content is content we want to be censored. Additionally, nothing is stopping a front-end from displaying information on the blockchain in a different way than Steemit does.

We could create a front-end where flags are upvotes and upvotes are flags. We could create a front-end where flags don't count as anything. We could make a front-end where flags get added to the total payout instead of subtracted. We could create a forum where upvotes and downvotes had zero effect on post order; everything would be chronological. We could create a front-end that gave ranking power of comments solely to the Original Poster. We could make a front-end that contained all of these options in a single settings menu. This can and will happen... someone will do it just for fun eventually.

No one can force us to organize the information of the Steem blockchain in a certain way. If @thedarkoverlord's account was actually removed from the blockchain by a few of the witnesses there would be a heinous consensus error and the entire blockchain would fail. An action like this would almost certainly create a fork, and that's exactly why no one would dare do it. It simply isn't worth the trouble.

immutable

What happens on the blockchain, stays on the blockchain. You can delete/overwrite a post/comment on Steemit, but all edits and iterations are visible on the blockchain, forever. To make the claim of censorship shows a complete lack of understanding regarding the core principals of distributed ledger technology.

Steem is the opposite of service that censors content. It is nearly impossible to delete/modify data on the blockchain. Instead of worrying about censorship, try worrying about every action you take being recorded on a ledger that everyone in the world has access to. Privacy is the legitimate blockchain concern, not censorship.