Stop Money-backed Censorship
I am no fan of plagiarism, if somebody tries to jack someone else's content and claim it as their own, I'm all for Cheetah and other "cleaners" going after them. That said, go after them how? Oh that's right, we set it up so that those with more Steem Power have the ability to censor others. In other words, we chose to take this beautiful idea of an immutable blockchain as a social media platform and proceed to sell our souls for money by turning it into an aristocracy. Don't believe me? Well, you probably never will because there is a good chance that this post gets censored....
When you have a like and an unlike button we allow people to have an idea what others think, but that doesn't necessarily make the topic hard to find, what Steem is doing with their votes does make it hard to find. That's not cool. It doesn't mean you will get better quality content, it means you have centralized messages controlled by those with the most money in the Steem ecosystem. If they don't like an idea, they can sweep it under the rug. This means we are in no way better than Facebook, Youtube or Twitter with regards to censorship.
What right do these people have to send your message to the abyss? Right by wealth. They are the new aristocrates of the tech world and whatever they want out there is visible simply because they deem it acceptable according to their own subjective sentiment. So they have become the new attackers of free speech.
Voting should not cause a loss in content money pool, there is absolutely no reason to give people the power to take money away from others. Refusing to upvote something is a vote against, and that's fine. If you dislike something, you should simply be able to ignore it, mute the person and move on.
In fact, the very concept of being able to downvote people into significantly being reduced in visibility is absolutely unnecessary and undemocratic. Everyone has their own mute button and we should all be able to choose for ourselves what we want to see and what we want to mute. We each have the ability to mute anything we wish for ourselves, so why give people the power over what we can see?
Midway Ad FTW!!!:
Is spam bad? It can certainly be annoying, and keeping it reasonably mitigated is understandable, but the reality is that the world needs advertising. Advertising is the way economies flow, without the ability to spread information about your products and services the economy would fall apart. I'm not saying it would completely go away, people might trade chicken eggs and what not, but it would be severely devastated. Even the right to advertise is a matter of free speech.
Yes, I know one might make the argument that there are appropriate areas for it and inappropriate areas, but actually, that stifles creativity, innovation and keeps the little people down that can't afford the traditional channels for exposure. A perfect example is about the economics of China. Its illegal for all the little carts to set up near the high pedestrian traffic areas, but these people can't afford expensive real estate and yet the local people find these services convenient and valuable to them as they rush to work or head home after an exhausting day and wish to eat a quick and easy meal.
What about on Steemit? Sure, you can get great visibility if you have lots of money, and if you have none or come from a country with a harsh job supply and wish to become a steempreneur, sorry dude, because you're forked. But that's okay, because you can buy this domain and start your business:
People love to hate spam, but you know what spam means?
Super Potent Alpha Males
At least that's my stance, because I am a free speech absolutist. No, I don't want the world to go too advertising crazy, and I do think it has done that a bit too much. But look, Steemit for most of us has not successfully started covering the bills, which means ads might still be needed at this point in time. So relax and take a shill pill...
Oh dude! Check this out!
Want to be followed, upvoted and resteemed from time to time by me? Be cool with me putting one of my images in a comment I make on your post and I will gladly be a regular participant in your community. Unless you're into really freaky stuff, because other than my obsession with asian women, I don't do fetish.
Lastly, I am an absolute believer in bringing good quality content to this community. In fact, I am very proud of many of my posts and a few comments. That said, for many reasons, very few people can make a good living off of writing content at this time in history, so let yourself see an ad or two in order to keep the good content coming from people of all economic positions in life, because poor people have good ideas too.