While I'm not participating in any such behavior, I have to ask about this social contract.
For me, this is unacceptable and clearly against Steem's social contract. I believe Steem funds are meant to be spent only on things which directly or indirectly contribute to the value of the Steem platform. We could make exceptions for charities, but not for commercial for-profit projects.
I've always found the term “social contract”, as a contract is something that is mutually agreed upon between two or more parties. Did you sign anything saying what you could or couldn't buy with your Steem dollars? I didn't. And clearly, the people who upvoted the project were in favor of the fundraiser. They have every right to support it just as you have every right to oppose it. But there is no "way things should be" -- especially when there's no actual contract with clear terms agreed to by all parties involved. I'm sure there are plenty of victims of sexual abuse who will tell you the dangers of appealing to the idea of "implied consent."
If there's behavior/ideas on the platform that I don't agree with, I can choose to 1) comment, 2) write a rebuttal post, 3) flag it if I find it abusive, 4) mute the user, 5) any combination of those four things, or 6) just move on.
I appreciate that you are passionate and wrote a rebuttal post for something you don't agree with; I just want to dispel this idea of a social contract as it simply doesn't exist. There's beauty in this... that users aren't controlled or subject to censorship is one of the major benefits of Steemit over other media platforms IMO. Cheers @innuendo. Thanks for making your voice heard. ✌️
Actually, it does exit. There can be no blockchain without a social contract around it. It can be implicit or explicit but it exists in some form. You can read more about it here. Ethereum is a good case showing what happens when you neglect this issue.
It's a problem I raised a couple of months ago - I argued that sooner or later we will be in trouble if we don't come up with some sort of more formal constitution or manifest or social contract. As a result, @dantheman has even prepared a draft but the issue was then dropped as focus has moved to development.
How can any contract exist without the signatures and mutual agreement of all parties?
In case of Steem, the contract is declared by the founders' public statements and the whitepaper. For example: immutability of the blockchain as far as censorship is concerned is one of the publicly declared axioms for Steem.
But you do have a valid point - founders' intentions should have been written down long time ago and each new user should have been asked to acknowledge them when registering a new account.
Without having this in place we ask for trouble. It's just a matter of time when this community hits a big dilemma and splits. A more formal social contract cannot fully prevent it (as it's hard to predict all future dilemmas) but at least this is the most we can do. Also, it's easier to decide which part of the split is more "classic" and sticks to the original intentions of the founders.