Is Steem just another marxist controlled limited hangout?
I am asking a legitimate question. I heard a rumor a while back, that if you want 'free speech' then try Steem.
So I have tried Steem, and what I am seeing is quite alarming. Same anti-free speech feel. Feels like the -shadowbanning- of the main platforms.
Today I checked out a Lee Camp video and saw yet another grayed out comment in the comments. Apparently all it takes is one troll, bot, call center employee paid to act like someone else online, etc., to 'hide' someone's legitimate comment.
Example:
So someone can spam an idiotic emotional reaction, and 'turn off' someone else's comment? While some other emotional angry folks can pump up that idiotic bot troll comment, paying the sub 100 IQ content, and penalizing and hiding the comment that could start a great constructive debate?
Well, I think I have seen all I need to see, to know not to steer friends and content creators to this platform. I surely am turned off, and not motivated to put my efforts into it. This is some disgusting display of Shadowy-Slimy censorship.
OldOneEye not liking what it sees.....
/rant off
Keep in mind that it costs VP to downvote (and hide comments). If that comment was upvoted by ~$0.05 then it would be visible again. The downvoters of that comment only did so with a rather small downvote. A 100% upvote by anyone with 3000-4000 SP would overide the downvote, and make the comment have a positive payout. You can rent that much SP from DLease for around $5 a week. With that you could undo ~50 of the comments hidden by this downvoter per week. Of course they might fight back and downvote more, but IDK.
This system was mainly designed to counter spam, plagiarism, etc., not to hide legit comments, BTW. Adding in a settings option to Steemit to show hidden comments be default would probably be a good idea: I might add that feature in a bit. (by writing a PR)
Good info thanks!
YUP!
Perhaps you are not famiiar with steemd, a sort of blockexplorer you can use to learn about particular accounts. Upon investigating @abusereports with steemd, you will discover that the account is one of many 'sock puppets' owned by the same person that runs the @berniesanders account, whose witness account is @nextgencrypto. Many of the consensus witnesses vote for that witness, and both the last two accounts were amongst the original 'ninjaminers' who mined all the steem there is into existence prior to any app or platform, even Steemit.
He has hella stake, invented to bidbot with @randowhale (now defunct) and is notorious for exactly the kind of flagging you notice happening to @joe.public, whose truthful and indomitable nature makes him incapable of pandering, even to high staked users with huge influence on Steemit, Inc.
Not long ago, a flag war began between the @berniesanders group of accounts and @fulltimegeek, who bought his stake with fiat, and also had many bots. Still does, actually. However, the end result of that disagreement was the initiation of censorship by Stinc, who has blacklisted all of @fulltimegeek's accounts, and even votes cast by his accounts are mystery votes, as the voter is not revealed in the UI. Since many frontends like Steempeak use Steemit APIs, on those apps @fulltimegeek is also completely censored.
As always, the first censorship is just the beginning of the slide down to complete narrative control, and as the flagging/censorship has burgeoned on Steem, users have been leaving in droves, and folks hearing of it from others who've seen it, like your friends will, have not been coming.
We hear rhetoric from Stinc about mass onboarding, but the HF21 that is coming soon will halve author rewards, double curation rewards - which favors substantial stake (the ninjaminers, who still hold almost all Steem in existence) financially, semi-exponential rewards curve - again, favoring large stakeholders, and lastly the newly proposed downvote pool, which will provide 25% more flags to each account based on their extant VP, which derives from their stake.
You don't have to wonder much about what will happen to anyone that irritates substantial stakeholders, like @berniesanders. The market is prepricing in the coming hardfork, as markets do, and the price of Steem is plunging, market cap declining, and users are hemorrhaging. After the real catastrophe rears it's ugly head upon implementation of HF21, the real decline will begin, as the market reacts to the full consequences to the market for Steem of reducing the number of participants by an order of magnitude.
I have made every effort to reveal these facts as the features were discussed, and only recently did the incessant flags on my every post and comment stop, as I would neither stop saying what I believe, nor care about the trivial financial impact on my account - as I do not use Steem as money, but came here, as you mentioned, to take part in a censorship resistant, decentralized social platform.
It's being killed, and Bernie seems to be the heart of the strike team taking it down, for whatever reason. It doesn't really matter to me why, only that it's happening, and I'm hunting around the edges for a replacement. I may have found something in Blockchan, which secretes posts in the Ripple network, but that's only a couple days old, and very, very alpha at present (not even really in beta yet). We'll see how that goes. Zeronet has also recently been used to recreate of version of 8chan, which has been taken down by Cloudflare, an internet wide security provider the secures websites from ddos attacks, and without that protection websites aren't viable, since they are overwhelmed with incessant DDOSing. 08chan isn't really 8chan, according to the admins of the closed site, but many of the users have gone there, and the zeronet protocol stores all images in IPFS, and users themselves host the nodes, which makes it immune to DDOS, and not vulnerable to legacy internet censorship. It does not have a cryptocurrency feature, which reduces rapacious flaggotry, a good thing IMHO.
There seem to be no cryptocurrencies presently potential to resist the weighting of stake to seize the majority of the value of the tokens, and while many pay lip service to decentralization, as long as the stake is substantially centralized, the users subject to KYC, and government regulation and control, they are little more than new features of the legacy fiat financial structure, in which I am not interested.
Hope that information is useful to you in your search for free speech. it's an ever more scarce and rare delight in this world, and that makes it of great value indeed. If you find it, do please let me know as you are able.
Thanks!
Excellent synopsis thank you. This spells it out exactly how I feared. Your breakdown is very thorough and gives a great picture of the state. Thank you for the info!
If there is also censorship in Steemit, turn it off and let's go. I DO NOT believe that the community allows this. Let's see what happens.
Uh Hello, go check my feed. You will notice it might be impossible to view from steemit.com! For Real censorship is here, sorry to burst your bubble!
Try my link:
https://steemit.com/sunset/@coininstant/tonights-sky-lii9uhsx
Oh, that there was some means to effect your purpose. Stake weighting determines the weight of votes on the platform. The ~30 or so whales can simply outvote everyone else on the platform, even if everyone else was of one mind and purpose - which is not even remotely potential.
The ninjamine pre-empowered our present ruling class on Steem. That's why it cannot attract investors seeking capital gains, as the only mechanism capable of ROI on Steem is rapine profiteering, which proves historically to destroy investment vehicles.
AMA. I have some small grasp of the principles underlying investment methodologies, and would be willing to provide such information as I possess.
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I'm selling my steem because of a narcissistic bot owner that is down voting me for no reason. Kicked me out of discord when pleaded my case. Made me feel like I wasted 3 years here.
Sorry about that, and I can completely see what you mean. It is obvious and apparent right off the bat. I haven't even gotten the hang of Steem yet fully, but I see the abused 'freedom'. Exists on all platforms but this insta-auto-hide feature is not so good. Detrimental in fact, to everyone except the narcissistic spy bots with agendas and a silencer blockchain bot army to shut up any voice that doesn't fit the 'narrative' that it wants.