That may be the mythology, or maybe even the goal of Hive - but it is FAR from what is actually offered here, where a few folks (azircon, altleft, curangel, acidyo, ocd being some of the main ones) actively attack, down-vote, and do everything they can to make this place just as censored as FB or Twitter.

What you said here, I couldn't have said it better. I wanted to add that just the fact that posts can be hidden here by downvotes (even though they are not deleted) is already a form censorship of information oppression. I think Dan's thesis was that the community would be able to monitor harmful content (I would call this decentralized censorship). I think his thesis was the more decentralized downvotes are the less it looks like censorship. He did not realize at the time that because stake is centralized because a small % of the population owns a portion of the wealth , big downvotes are more centralized. This platform might be better than 1 govern body being able to censor, but still the censorship power is in the power of the wealthy.