All content on Steemit is highly censored and centralized since the few actual users who own majority of the supply get to decide which posts make it to the front page and which posts get higher payouts. Accounts are easy to create and majority of the top accounts are most likely controlled by a small group of people making Steemit highly susceptible to sybil attacks. Simply put, for any content to make it to the front page, it is subject to the approval of the developer and his ‘friends’…
Are you an influential or well-known public figure? The developer and his ‘friends’ will give you a nice ‘payout’ so you feel good and start promoting their shady platform to the public. The number of people being lured in through this method is alarming and disappointing. Post something that the majority stakeholders don’t like and your post will never see the light of day despite being well-received by many users.
https://decentralize.today/the-ugly-truth-behind-steemit-1a525f5e156
Censorship comes in many forms, intimidation is one of them. The material may stay on a page but the damage is done through ruining people's reputations and flagging their accounts to a loss.
Intimidation might be used to effect censorship but Intimidation by itself is not a form of Censorship, in fact, intimidation is usually used to force people to say or do things that they don't want to. Censorship cannot happen if I can click a button and it reveals whatever was censored and censorship is completely redundant when you can post freely what you want regardless of how people curate your content. Intimidation is equally redundant becasuse intimidation and threats can come from all forms, not only downvoting but explicitly through acts and deeds, and "ruining reputation" is clearly not censorship, but a metric that Curates your account in the community. Saying that the material is not affected is basically admitting there is no censorship, and vacating your position is demonstrated by moving onto arguing about the reputation as if the account holder is responsible for only the good curation to his content, reek of entitlement much?
If the equivalent of steemit(not steem because there is no hidden things on steem) censorship existed on youtube or anywhere else it would never be considered censorship, the only reason it's considered censorship here is because people have distorted what censorship is and used that loaded concept to play off peoples emotions and reactionary stances instead of speaking with precision and specifity so as not to create confusion or distort the facts and lead people to interpret Curation as Censorship. Is it Censorship when people downvote things on youtube? Or is censorship when the comments get deleted? Or you consider censorship both and believe that only Porn and Threats or Plagiarism and Spam should be "censored", or not even those? Fuck that I don't want to debate censorship with someone that speaks at length like an idiot about things they ought to know better, like SteemIt being Steem.
BTW, nobody can stop you from posting, you can post with -10000000 reputation.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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