@doolgus, yes reply depth is annoying.

Your comments about the removal of racist posts from steemit.com and about using an alternate blockchain view are correct. Not hard to do in fact, since you can just download the source to the steemit.com web site from their github and host your own.

BTW, here is another explorer for the same blockchain hosted by a community member which provides a bit more low-level detail: https://steemd.com. You can also use that as a conventional block explorer using b/blocknum and tx/txid paths, though I don't see where it has a search box.