So yesterday I wrote an article named EOS - is the ICO a SCAM?, where I suggested that the way the ICO was being held showed the real intentions of block.one (aka Daniel Larimer & Co.).
Although the post has been hidden due to low ratings for reasons I will continue to explain, you can still read it here: https://steemit.com/eos/@eltapatio/eos-is-the-ico-a-scam (just click on show)
As you can see, I am a pretty small user, who has been posting here every now and then for about a month already.
Usually my posts are not read by many people, and do not tend to cause big enough reactions, but I was surprised when yesterday, my post on EOS, got a comment by , who is well known by the crypto community.
I was getting good feedback from readers, most of who shared or at least appreciated my views on the topic, and the overall rating was positive, with 10 up votes and 1 down vote.
My reputation was growing and went from the initial 25 to 32, and I was getting some new followers.
Everything changed once a user named gave me a negative vote, which led to my current situation, with the post being hidden and my reputation score at 12 (less than half the original figure).
I want to make clear that my intention is not to complain about people giving me negative ratings, or not agreeing on what I think, as that's absolutely normal.
What I don't really understand is why a single down vote can remove a post and hide it from future potential readers, without the need to justify this.
As you can see from the following screenshot, there are 10 positive votes and 2 negative ones:
When I go to my blog section and try to open the article I wrote, I get the following message:
So when I saw that the general feedback was absolutely positive, and yet my post was removed, I realized that there was something wrong, so I made some research to find out why this happened.
My two negative votes where by:
, which is a bot to prevent people auto voting themselves.
, who's name does not say much at first sight.
I used the website www.steemd.com to find out more about these two profiles, and I saw something interesting.
is not a very powerful member, so even if I was to be blacklisted (which I shouldn't be, and was not given a reason why I was), his vote wouldn't have harmed my reputation.
's profile looks like this:
These are signs of a very powerful account, so I started to understand what was going on here.
This guy has over 3000 followers, and only writes and resteem's positive things about EOS, as you can see:
He only follows 3 people:
And he is among the 12 profiles being followed by .
At this point, it was already clear who he was (he is Dan Larimer). I just did not understand why he has two profiles, being the main one and
the secondary one.
This is what he wrote on my article (with my answer below his comment):
He clearly talks about himself as a part of block.one team.
Now, I don't really know if it was known to people who is, but that's not really the point of all this.
My point is that all this BS about decentralization, no governments or central banks, and FREEDOM, are not portrayed in this platform, where a single powerful person can shut people up as easily as did, even though the overall feedback was well over 80% positive, and I did not infringe any terms (even though he blacklisted me as well through
).
Shouldn't we be able to argue and give our opinions, whether positive or negative, without being removed from the platform?
Isn't that the whole point of the internet and decentralization (blockchain), to be able to express ourselves freely without fear of potential negative consequences?
I believe this is not what and his team want to create, and I believe they make a big mistake by removing articles they don't want people to see, instead of intelligently replying and exposing people like me (in case they can do such think, which I believe they cannot).
Sooner or later, people will know the truth.
Thanks for reading.