If you've been on Steemit for a while you'll know that the topic of Pizzagate has not appeared on the front page trending for some time now.
Some have alleged that #pizzgate is being censored, some have argued that it's just no longer trending in the top 25 topics, while others claim its absence is due to glitches in the Steemit system.
At first, I believed the argument that it was simply 'not trending' currently, that would explain why it no longer shows up on the front page. That's fine and dandy but it doesn't explain why it has completely disappeared from the tags & topic listings once again for an extended period (weeks/months).
So maybe it's a glitch in the system, right?
Yeeaahhh...i don't know.
Why would this glitch only be affecting #pizzagate?
There are hundreds of pizzagate posts....while seemingly dead tags such as these listings remain:
- 'pegging' (3 -posts) $ 11.9
- 'black chain' (2-posts) $1.9
- 'craigright' (2-posts) $0
- 'firstwordproblems (1-post) $0
- 'drug-abuse (1-post) - $0
- 'half-explanations (1-post) $0
- 'lifeseries' (1-post) $0
- 'megalithis (2-posts) $0
- 'nfws' (1-post) $0
- 'Shremring' (1-post) $0
- 'slamchallenge' (1-post) $0
Surely, none of these Tags are trending, or were ever trending. Some of these are just spelling mistakes, I assume. Yet, they remain. They do not disappear because of some 'glitch', though maybe they should.
Total Posts
A few weeks ago, i wondered how many total posts were made to the #pizzagate Tag, as there seemed to be a healthy community. Since it was not displayed in the listings, I checked esteem by doing a tag search. When you type in the tag title it provides some anticipated topics. Pizzagate and the total number of posts associated with the tag appears when you do this.
I remember noticing that, at that time, #pizzagate was just under 900 total posts.
I then remember checking it again a few weeks later and curiously it was still below 900 even though, like many others, I am a regular contributor. This was puzzling.
Are #pizzagate posts being artificially suppressed?
I decided to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. I took a few screen grabs when i could last week.
Here are a few of them starting with the oldest post which I took probably 10 days ago.
Notice the total posts at 821 (This is a reduction of at least 60 posts from when i first started noticing they were not increasing.)