I recently had an idea that will most likely be very polarizing depending on what stance you have on the issue of having the ability to create complete censorship resistance. Basically my idea revolves around giving the ability for users to lock their post with a password and block anyone from seeing it on their feed. It would be available in the posts of the person, but the title would be crossed out and the payment and ability to vote would be forfeited. Im not sure of the technical possibilities to even implement this, but the point would be to incorporate full censorship resistance into posts.
The reason why this can be polarizing is because it could essentially create communities of people using Steemit for criminal actions. Like the darkweb using tor and having pedofile groups, or terrorist forums, there is the possibility that if the tool is given to them, they will use it. This was one of the early fears of bitcoin and other crypto because hypothetically it could give the ability to cater to these industries/ does currently if you believe some articles. However I think that the ultimate benefit that it gives to the community is far greater.
There are already much better and more decentralized ways for these people to communicate so I don’t think Steemit will be a huge pull to them. Using tor on a VPN is probably safer so I would imagine the people would keep using the systems that they are using. Like I said before im not sure if you could even implement an idea like this with the current blockchain we have, or if it would end up being pseudo anonymous. With the addition to password protected posts, password protected message passing could also be implemented, giving a way for people to use the Steemit blockchain to communicate.
The essential benefits that password and censorship protection gives, is the ability for people to communicate without fear of reprisal if they are doing something their government does not condone. If twitter wasn’t used in the Arab Spring revolutions, the message people were trying to portray to each other would have never materialized. The problem with twitter was that some people involved in failed revolutions were apprehended and arrested. There are ways for these people to contact eachother and communicate, but we have the ability to put it all in one place and password protect it.
You could essentially run the same type of blog people are running on the darknet, but with the ability to access it with ease, if given the password. Also the accounts involved can message pass with eachother. I am curious to see if this could even be implemented or if it even really makes sense given the amount of work needed. Would love to hear your thoughts and the thoughts of the technical people here that would know about the difficulty of implementing such a system. It isn’t needed immediately, I just believe that offering the ability could help groups communicate on more private issues better than what is available today.