At the very least a conversation is needed. I spend most of my time looking for content to curate, and there's a lot of abuse. I say this from an outsiders perspective, because I'm obviously not part of the community's behind it. Every self-appointed regulator has his reasons.
But without correction, I think conflating the downvote system with censorship is warranted. Because it doesn't solve anything. But it can discourage good people from contributing. Not everyone's Hivewatchers. I admit, that they do it correctly.
However, if good accounts keep getting caught in the crossfire of one personal beef after another, I think the system needs to be canned.
Mmm, I think that glosses over a nuanced idea of what censorship actually is.
By definition: suppression of speech, public communication, or other information.
Key nuance: subjectivity of "suppression."
If you pick up a few random downvotes that knock a penny off your post, is that really suppression? I don't think so.
If you get zero'd out by someone (for any reason), that's arguably not even suppression:
*As @darth-azrael pointed out, some frontends can employ "suppression." Though this is what I'd consider very light suppression—a flag on the content or the requirement of an extra click to see it. That, plus your content wont get extra attention through whatever 'trending' algos are in place.
Hardly politicized censorship, which often employs violence and other nefarious means to truly suppress communication of dissidents. And that's why I disagree with conflating the ideas. The mainstream understanding of "censorship" is juiced up to infer some kind of extreme, organized, nefarious movement. When people start tossing around the word "censorship" to describe a downvote mechanism that maybe lightly-to-moderately suppresses their content on handful of frontends... it leads to overblown, emotionally charged arguments that only sow anger and division. I've seen it here on Hive (not necessarily in this post's threads... yet) and it's ugly and depressing.
I will probably create a follow up post that more accurately describes my position. This one is a tad bit emotionally charged, lol. Thanks for the feedback.
You're welcome! I'd be interested in seeing that post for sure. 🙂