I personally feel that allowing freedom of speech is more important than not allowing abuse.
In my mind it is the harmfulness of abuse that should be approached. I know that its a difficult problem to solve, so difficult that the human race doesn't have good solutions for post moderation yet as a whole, on the other hand I think steem already provides an elegant solution, in the long run however the success of it completely depends on whether it allows people freedom or not, I've been around the block on steem, and my impression is that the types of policing that does exist is often more of a moneymaking racket than people making posts that are similar, badly researched, unsourced, etc etc.
Research articles is in my mind the lowest form of the blog, and personal opinion the highest and most valuable form, so that probably helps to explain why I have the thoughts on the subject that I do.
I like the anarchic, free atmosphere of the internet, it allows people to be themselves without living in fear, we all need to learn how to police outright scams, spams, properly abusive use of competitions, groups and services ourselves, so that we as a community can figure out what is the most elegant and effective patch that can eventually be used to automate the processes we do manually.
I hope we're looking at the situation with clear vision and the road ahead with enough foresight not to make steem boring, which it already is in many ways, to the frustration of many long term internet users.
I like your points, and I'm not trying to counter them in any way, I'm just hoping to add some ideas to the discourse.
It's not really censorship. If you don't pay for someone else to publish an article in your newspaper, it's not censorship. The fact is that it costs money to run sites. It costs quite a bit of money. The current blockchain incarnation is already fucking huge. Every witness server might be big enough to run this site by itself if it weren't on a blockchain. We can't have people abusing the system and making it harder to run the site. The question is how much are we going to supplement newbs, so they can earn enough to support themselves on here.
If the rates that are implemented are too restrictive, we can establish groups to find people to target for delegations. It's not that huge of an issue.
But it certainly feels like a huge issue when you're a new user and you're told that you haven't invested enough to comment any more times per day.
Of course, if they put in as much as they pay for their cell phone, they could probably get on fine. But we aren't quite that good for most yet.
Everyone pays for hosting. How they do it is the difference. On some sites you pay for it with your eyes on advertisers. On some you pay with your data...and eyes on advertisements, because that's practically free money. Here, you pay with investment and in turn get paid. They probably could just cover everyone with the investments of the larger accounts, but they decided that there were certain accounts abusing the system. To deal with that, they decided to put in this system. Now the question is how much to limit small accounts, because the system as it was originally implemented was thought to be too strict.
As to the value of Steem...it's actually a split. There are certainly a lot of bloggers here that bring value...as well as some that are just leeches, but the actual value of Steem is caused by investors and traders, evaluating a number of factors, including the platform.
They've basically just turned it into a game where you have to level up first to be able to use it constantly. I have faith that many that we want to stay will deal with the limits for long enough that they can grow their account a bit. There will also be groups that pop up to increase people's delegations that appear to be really good users.