Let me open with acknowledging that during our last interaction, I was not kind to you. I took out frustrations on you and directly charged you with enabling deaths and the general ongoing state of the world. I still view vaccine/COVID skepticism with a lot of frustration, and I still believe that a lot of people have died due to the misinformation that is available.

But attacks and accusations are not constructive discourse. I told you that you should be ashamed of yourself, which I believed at the time, however, looking back on that day it is I who is ashamed, for giving in to what felt good, instead of what is constructive. I hope that you share my desire to set this aside.

That said, I need to address this passage:

It would also be interesting to understand why you posted about VEHMT, since even if it is a strange 'in joke' that only your personal friends understand, it's probably not the best signal to be presenting the world of investors who are looking for a Hive 'team' to assess before investing and are left mostly only with top 20 witnesses.

I take issue with a couple of items here. First of all, VHEMT's goals and antinatalism in general are legitimate and harmless personal views to espouse. If anyone declines to invest in Hive because of one witness's personal views on having children, my stake doesn't want their money and I hope yours doesn't either.

What's more, and this is key: witnesses are not the "Hive team." To the extent that any "Hive team" exists, any such entity may have some significant overlap with the set of 20 witnesses, but the truth is that we are all the "Hive team." Witnesses can be voted out. The Hive community abandoned one "official team" already who did not align with our goals. They were called "Steemit Inc.," under the leadership of Justin Sun. Given a similar situation, we would succeed in doing it again.

There's a reason why most top 20 witnesses don't post or say much and I presume it is partially because they don't want to generate negative press for themselves or Hive.

Personally I find this sad. On a platform where we claim to value, above all, freedom of expression and a rejection of censorship (though none of us quite seem to agree what censorship is), are you celebrating self-censorship? Sure, market forces may encourage witnesses to stay silent, but I'm not going to celebrate it. The fact that we can all have different ideas is, most of the time, a beautiful thing. I generally want to see more self-expression from our public figures, not less. Tight-lipped, double-speaking politicians are boring.