HI @stevesmith. The best way currently to establish if somebody is a whale is to check their STEEM POWER in their wallet. If they have under 3.5k SP then they are a minnow (over 1k is considered a fat minnow). Between that and around 30k is considered a dolphin. Over 300k is considered a whale but between 30k and 300k is considered an orca whale. These number do change with time though!
This is not ideal of course. I have suggested an idea that would make it easier to distinguish the active users from the bots.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@beanz/increasing-demand-for-steem-power-with-status
Thank you for that reply beanz. I actually understood some of it and you answered my main concern.
And a bot is someone that is not a real person? That seems odd considering that because I didn't have a facebook or reddit account I was put on a waiting list and waited for a few weeks before being allowed to join. Presumably to check me out and make sure I was a real person. I have no idea what the criterion is. But I guess they decided I was okay. (I wonder if they are second guessing that decision about now). I guess that means that there are bot accounts on those sites as well? Who knew.
Here's what I do here in case anyone is interested. And here is my only concern.
I "followed" a bunch of people who I know from youtube. And then, by following some people that they followed I followed some more. I think I'm up to about thirty now.
James Corbett was the main reason I came here. But there was a number of others as well.
I go to my "feed" page and read as many of the posts and sometimes the comments from those I am following as time allows. I don't have nearly enough time to read everything.
What I want to know is simply this. Are people being censored here? I know that it happens on youtube. I've heard it happens on facebook. I suppose it happens on reddit. But I don't really know anything about that site.
Is everything that is produced by those I'm following there for me to see? What difference does it make to me if a whale doesn't like something and downvotes it? Do I still see it on my "feed"?
I know that ignorance as profound as mine must be tiring and frustrating for many of you. But please have patience and pretend that you are dealing with your grand father.
I don't expect that this site is going to be the be-all and end-all of freedom on the internet. I was led to believe it was a step in the right direction and if it is, great. I was hoping it was. But if it's just another place where a few powerful people control what other less powerful people have access to read. I need to know.
I'm just trying to understand what Steemit is all about and what it's true objectives are. I'm too old to put a lot of energy into things I don't feel good about.
Censorship is inevitable. But here, the censorship is decentralised. In other words, when I upvote your post, I am choosing to make your post more visible than other posts. Everybody is technically censoring content by upvoting and flagging. And the whales have the greatest power in this censorship.
As for your feed where you follow people, nothing is censored. Even if you follow a user who loses their reputation, their posts still come up in your feed (just greyed out).
Don't worry I understand there is a lot to catch up on. I felt lost when I joined too and there was not as much for me to learn back then, things here change pretty fast.
At the moment it is a large handful of whales who control what comes to the top of the trending page and what gets hidden from view (but not in your feed). However the idea of this decentralised economic system is that with time the power will be distributed among those of us who are most active and most rewarded by the whales. The whales are powering down to reduce steem power and selling on the market, while the budget of rewards stays the same, so many minnows are growing into dolphins and the odd dolphin might even become an orca whale. But it takes time and I have no guess as to how much time. I could speculate but I don't want somebody smarter than me to see this and call me out on it lol. Here's a post by dan that might make things clearer. I advise you to read the content of @dantheman, @ned and @steemitblog first, as they are the creators of the platform (dan & ned).
Don't be afraid to ask questions to anybody you see with a high reputation (they are more likely to give you more accurate answers). Don't bother asking anybody with a rep below 50...
EDIT: I believe there was some additional "censorship" added. The NSFW content can only be found under the NSFW tag. None of the other tags show NSFW content. But that just means to see that content you have to go to https://steemit.com/created/nsfw
So even pornography is allowed.
I'm a zooplankton