You guys made me wonder why I'm not following him, the name is known well enough, after all.

It was truly, honestly simply because we have completely different interests, that is all, so I looked whether I had an unpleasant encounter with him.

I did have an encounter, but not unpleasant. So, to be fair, he upvoted my corrections of his corrections of my post; I count that as a "concession": so in dubio pro reo, I assume he is not completely immune to sound reason and solid arguments and just loves, as much as I do, Socratic trolling and playing devil's advocate.

For some, that is terribly annoying, others appreciate being pushed beyond their intellectual comfort zone.

You are both right: censorship is impossible on the blockchain, as it is decentralized and immutable. At the same time, if a whale or collective of whales downvote a post into invisibility and oblivion, thus denying it attention, readership and "rewards", it does constitute a form of censorship. So it actually depends on the interface.

So far, however, I am quite pleased even with Steem as seen through the Steemit lens. "Conspiracy theories", I mean, valid criticism of the status quo receive much more attention than threadbare attempts at "coincidence theorizing", ridicule of tinfoil crackpots and defenses of "conventional wisdom", "externalized thinking" or "received knowledge".

Note the "so far"; the potential dangers posed to the project by future generations of whales have already been highlighted.