Sometimes wealthy Steemians will wage their influence in order to stymie access to information that they don't agree with. Apparently, this nasty little ingredient called flagging was baked into the Steemit cake a long time ago. I call it soft-censorship.
Hopefully, more sensible developers of this platform will consider removing that ingredient, before the idea starts to spread, that the cake is a lie, or the cake is a pie, or the cake is actually just a goddamned social experiment in behavior modification.
Imagine, if you will, a busker whose been hard at work performing music for several hours on any given day. The busker sees that he now has just enough to rent that motel room, and purchase a little food, and right as he is packing up his musical instrument; someone walks up, pours gasoline in his tip jar, and then sets it aflame.
Well that's very similar to downvoting (or flagging) on Steemit, and maybe that's been Steemit's plan all along in order to thwart hyperinflation... Who knows?
Don't get me wrong, I think that downvoting is cool, if it's meant to express an opinion. However, the way in which Steemit has implemented it, it allows wealthy people to destroy value that other people have attempt to convey in the form of an upvote.
It's a very ugly, and destructive mechanic, and because of it: I plan to stop recommending that people come to this platform until it's corrected. I personally think that it violates the non-aggression principle, but I suppose, that's probably debatable.
As YouTube continues to bleed out, and more and more content creators come to Steemit. Steemit is going to make itself a target.
No doubt, you'll eventually have hundreds of (George Soros) paid instaWHALES trolling the fuck out of well intentioned content creators. It may likely result in downvote wars, which could spike the value of the SBD temporarily.
Yet, as the Steemit tax (downvoting) on free speech continues to grow higher, and higher; the downvoting wars will eventually morph into meme wars which could end the Steemit experiment overnight.
Memes are magical, they tend to trigger the 100th monkey effect. They can take the form of images with text, they can take the form of tweets. With memes; culture can be radically altered. I think that this has been proven without a shadow of a doubt.
Recently, Kylie Jenner released a meme in the form of a tweet that wiped out 1.3 billion in snapchat's stock value. That's pretty powerful, and all she did was point out the obvious.
Screenshot of Tweet
Apparently, Snapchat rolled out a new interface and myspaced themselves in the process. All her tweet did was highlight the fact that Snapchat myspaced themselves.
Steemit has this auto-destruct feature built into it, and they need to fix it before it becomes problematic. Once word gets around that Steemit allows wealthy users to maliciously soft-censor others, it could potentially get unpopular, very quickly!
That's just my opinion on the matter, what say you, can you convince me otherwise? Sound off in the comments below! If you are a dev, what was your intentions with the downvote function?
This post started off as a comment inspired by @clarityofsignal's post.