Don't call it censorship though. All bad ideas published on Hive will still forever will be stored into the blockchain. There's some food for thought.
As has been addressed many times, censorship is not limited to deletion, but also includes suppression.
Like the zeroing out the rewards on posts that are trending, effectively hiding them from the [hive-scale] masses.
Most often being done by 1 person.
Outweighing the upvotes of hundreds of people.
Nothing of value is being suppressed though.
Take a look at whatever you are posting, and ask what you yourself out of your own pocket would pay for that if it was written by someone else.
Then call it suppression.
There are millions of conspiracy theory blogs out there that look exactly alike. Do you think they should all be rewarded for basically copy-pasting the shit the other blog is saying?
I say that would be validating making zero-effort blogs. That would devalue everything else that actually has value.
What I mean is, Zero effort means Zero rewards.
Who decides what is of value?
One of my last posts as well as a chess post (a self-composed chess problem which cost me hours to produce it) got downvoted as retaliation for criticizing a top witness (a very big part of all downvotes is given due to different opinions or retaliation purposes).
HIVE is completeley centralized and dominated by early miners and former bid bot owners who, in addtion, vote each mutually as wtinesses and decide which proposals will be supported.
Furthermore, they lend each other their posting keys and delelegate stake to sock accounts to mask their actions.
I call that an oligarchy which is - if at all - only slightly superior compared to Justin Sun's monarchy.
(Apart from that I don't share the political point of views of many users who are complaining here, but completely share their criticism concerning the downvoting on and centralization of HIVE.)
I can only assume you are speaking of this chess related post written about a year ago, where you made quite substantial rewards, even after being downvoted for 0,169€ and 4,659€ by two accounts.
Where's your loss though? Remember, the money isn't really yours until it's in your wallet.
I'm not going to argue about centralization issues, since you don't really understand how the HP is spread.
These figures from mid-2020 show that the power distribution on Hive is clearly not centralized in whale hands only, but the middle-class actually controls most of Hive Power, and the whales do not.
For comparison, here's how the power was distributed on Steem before we migrated to Hive:
It doesn't really seem as bad as you are suggesting.
The biggest downvote on the chess post was removed from @theycallmedan after @themarkymark flagged it using his posting key.
Which loss? Did I write about any loss?
(Don't worry about my rewards, just check the value of my Splinterlands cards ...)
I said a big amount of flags are due to pure retaliation.
Concerning the "substantial rewards": @themarkymark who pretended to downvote this chess post because of the high pending rewards posts himself nearly every day very short posts (partly copying any news on crypto which everybody can read in the net anyway) and earns far more with these short posts (at least it was like that when I checked his account quite some time ago).
What about my last post without disabling rewards? Pure retaliation flags again.
Furthermore I had a soccer tippster competition where I upvoted the comments of the winners of the specific game days to reward the effort and keep motivation of the participants high. @usainvote (an anonymous account with a big delegation from @blocktrades felt he had to flag these comments). Another example where policing the blockchain without any communication and understanding what the flagged posts are about caused several users to quit HIVE.
Some centralized oligarchs make decisions here like "(Too) high upvotes of comments are evil.", while automated curation sniping without own effort is just so great ... and then decide who fits into their rules and who doesn't.
The graphics of @arcange doesn't illustrate the fact that many dolphin accounts are second or third whale accounts. How many single persons are behind the few whale accounts?
In my eyes HIVE is for sure very centralized.
In Splinterlands for example there are far more different stakeholders with "substantial" stake, so the economy of this game is far more balanced than the HIVE oligarchy.
You did ask a question about who decides the value. Of course I would immediately think you are talking about Hive rewards.
Wow! You certainly have a lot more value there than I do.
About centralization though...
Who knows, I might be a whale. Or orca... I don't really care.
I've recently taken a "don't complain" policy on whales. They will cease to be of relevance soon enough. The fact of the matter is, they are not all "bad", and eventually those who downvote from spite, don't have enough HP to bully everyone.
In the past, when it happened to me, I managed to use the spiteful downvoting campaigns I was subjected to my own advantage. Though I have to admit it's easier when the reason for downvotes is akin to "you're being too friendly with someone I don't like".
Indirecty, yes, because in general I think it is not reasonable for a reward based platform if a few accounts have (so) much more influence on the distribution of the rewards (on the witness positions, on the approval of proposals, ..., ...) than the big majority of the users because it discourages users who don't get the support from (or even get attacked by) these few accounts.
Just as an example, how could a whale, who even cannot play that game, judge a chess post? Chess players can ... so to determine the value of a post, experts would make a much better job than just millionaires. Furthermore, as metioned elsewhere, there could be "sophisticated algorithms" which for example might double check sources etc. and thus suggest an evaluation of a post.
That doesn't change the fact that concerning single posts of course there is no entitlement that pending rewards are always final rewards.
That again doesn't change the fact that I disapprove the behavior to cut pending rewards for reasons like retaliation.
My guess is that people in power are on average not significantly better or worse than the 'average guy'. But as they have more power it is more important to find mechanisms to control their power than to control the power of the average guy, simply because they can cause much more damage IF they act in a bad way.
Must a dictator by definition be worse than you or me? I think not. Is a dictatorship bad, because a single person shouldn't have too much power? I think yes ...
Some use tools for good, some think they use tools for good, and some don't even know what to do with their tools.
Now switch the word "tools" to "knowledge", "money", "power".
I am saying there is no system that can fix this. Any attempts to create one... well we know well what has happened when we've tried creating these "fixed" systems. They end up being quite draconian.
If you only knew what accounts these guys own. What happened to bernie sanders? Which one of them is him?
I left this fake immutable decentralized platform for all the liars and fake friends you get here. You missed one thing they all hide behind multiple unknown accounts. There is no person to hold accountable for their crimes against their fellow man.
They are a bunch children who only want to play games!
It is a cesspool of all the scum of the earth hiding behind memes and icons.
Taking posts that are trending, and deleting all their rewards so they disappear for anyone not following the author, is suppression of information.
This isn't a conversation about "rewards," that is just the excuse/scape-goat that these folks (who admit all the time that their priority is protecting their stake) keep using to avoid the conversation of centralization and censorship.
By that same logic everyone who comes to Hive as a new user is being suppressed too.
Nobody is entitled to be seen on Hive though, and that has never been suppression, and never will it be.
The posts don't magically "disappear" though. They can still be seen by anyone.
For you to really be suppressed, you'd have to be disconnected from your followers.
Bullet points: