What a load of horseshit.

Let me put it simply, as we've been around this before. Down voting / flagging is part of the free market, it is not against it. It's not censorship etc. etc., but disagreement. It doesn't really matter what you or I say about it, it works without us.

Code is law, period, but that doesn't make the particular laws just. And laws can be changed, but thankfully not easily. So saying code is law doesn't do much when discussing ethics and change. We literally can't go against the system here, it's rock solid - the single exception would be unintended holes such as the DAO. For the record, this was a hack. You fail to understand that exploiting a bug is still a hack.

The shaming and virtue signalling I could care less about, you find all kind of social arguments in social situations, some fair and some unfair. We're all free to exercise our own judgement here.

One other particular point of contention, the Terms of Service relate to steemit.com, so point 17.1.3 applies to the website not the blockchain, which is what all bots run on. I know you know that if you'd bothered to think beyond one step.