RE: Is HIVE run by the community or by the next Justin Sun? Witnesses please help clarify?

Witnesses have no control over this.

Unlike Steem, we aren't censoring anything - there are no real "blacklists" or "whitelists" at the voting level.

There are no rules, for or against bid bots - it's simply one person @ctime choosing to downvote posts that have upvotes from bid bots, as they think that bid bots are wrong.

We have no way of blacklisting or banning @ctime (and to even be able to do so would be enforcing censorship - we're supposed to be neutral).

There's a few ways you can deal with this:

Don't use bid bots and @ctime will stop flagging you

1.1. Promote your posts in a more natural way, e.g. via the @minnowsupport community

Use more powerful bid bots so that @ctime's downvote is weaker than the upvotes
Power up a lot of HIVE so your vote is more powerful than @ctime's downvote
Or just go on a flagging war and flag all of @ctime's posts

It's your choice - this platform is all about freedom to use your stake as you like. Some have chosen to use their stake to flag things they disagree with, and there's nothing any of the witnesses can really do about it.

So your solution is:

Give in to what another user wants if you don't want to be down voted on your original not entirely shit content: So he is in a way censoring my freedom to use a service.

1.1.2 instantly have more money some how
1.1.3 downvote @ctime's content, oh wait he doesn't produce anything...

I don't have any problem with freedom, but allowing this kind of behaviour will cause HIVE to just turn into a CURATOR and WHALE circle jerk and its very easy to see, just look at big account rewards vs normal accounts and where they get their votes?

Just as an example, I have nothing against you, just the first article I saw: @theycallmedan has an account value of 231 179.636 as of right now using the @esteemapp wallet balance. He made 71.48 USD currently on his latest post.

With such a massive account balance does he really such a big upvotes ?
Look at all the top voters and look at their vote %, please show me where they vote with those percentages on normal accounts, I'll wait.

I'm not here for the money, I have a job, well after Corona again. So don't look at this as me bitching about the money. I'm willing to put all my posts on decline payout going forward, though @ctime is already taking care of that for me. But i bring musicians and artists to this platform to help them spread the news about their art and in turn make some money. So whilst all the big accounts are throwing each other with money these new guys have to post 20 articles to even make a dollar. So yes, @steembasicincome helps accounts like theirs and selfish bullies like @ctime will be the end to bringing and encouraging new users

In saying that, I know i'm wasting my breath as you will just shrug it off. So rather I'll ask this. How many community votes would it take for you to implement a downvote/upvote feature on a persons page. Have everyone start at 50% , if you get to 0% your voting ability stops and you can only post to redeem yourself and build up your rep. If it gets to 100% you are a verified good practice user.

If you think that person is abusive, spamming, plagiarising ,downvote them if you think they are posting good content or a nice person upvote them. Votes are 1:1 with no influence of HP like when voting for a witness. What would it take to bring that in? I'll personally send the poll around.