If Steem remains a libertarian / anarchist enclave then it will fail to attract a broader audience and that in turn will mean that ordinary people will not get involved with cryptocurrency.

I don't think that to be attracted to crypto generally, or to the steem platform, you have to be full on barry cooper or lukeawarechange. But I do think that generally, the target audience is libertarian leaning.

Call it "censorship" or whatever you like. When a single user or group of users comes together to hide information they don't like, or just arbitrarily hide information out of spite, its desirable to stop that.

I do agree with you that anyone ought to be able to vote however they like, and that its reasonable to restrict visibility based on that vote (in fact, i think trying to suppress downvotes is just as bad as trying to suppress​ content). That said, with so much effort expended to "police" content, i think it is possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the wrong direction.

For example, lets say that several stakeholders join forces to create an even medium-sized block, say 20,000SP. Just as an example, lets say they decide to flag any post about abortion that is pro-choice. At that point, "let the other stakeholders decide" is sort of irrelevant because the other stakeholders will very likely never see it.

In fact, a single rogue user was able to hide dozens of new users post. I was actually pretty surprised that in all the talk about how we could take away this guys vote, no one ever thought to go back and unhide all the posts that had been hidden.