I don't want my first posts on Hive to just be a stream of Steemit rants, but this dispute with Justin Sun is a significant issue that deeply affects me. I wrote an open letter to Justin Sun and Steemit Inc. where I strove to be civil despite the chaos surrounding his acquisition of the Steemit stake and site, and the subsequent anger at his actions that resulted in Hive coming into existence.
After that post, I continued to read more from the community and the various official posts from Steemit. On further examination, it became apparent that the Steemit team had recently added a new clause to the Terms of Service specifically as an ex post facto justification for punishing dissenters and hard fork secessionists.
14.1.7. [You agree that you will not...] Use our services to promote third-party platforms or to promote each other without our written permission.
—Steemit Terms of Service
As of this post, the TOS page still says, "Last Updated June 15, 2018." Thanks to the Wayback machine we can look allllll the way back to March 8th of 2020, barely two weeks ago, and see this. No clause 14.1.7. Nothing. Nada.
We all know any website terms and conditions are subject to change at any time, but this quiet edit is a transparently malicious scheme to quell dissent via censorship instead of fulfilling the promise to cooperate with the established community and promote open discourse. This action is proof of the new Steemit administration's dishonesty and authoritarianism. They even conveniently ignored clause 9.4 themselves, which states, in part,
All proposed Steem blockchain transactions must be confirmed and recorded in the Steem blockchain via the Steem distributed consensus network (a peer-to-peer network), which is not owned, controlled, or operated by us. [emphasis added]
—Ibid.
So where did all those sock puppet witnesses come from, hmmmmm? I smell rank hypocrisy. You've got some 'splainin' to do here. Why are you so afraid of dissent that you need both public and private blacklists to cover up opposition? Why didn't you have the courage to make a public announcement of the new terms of service? You and your crew are doing everything you can conceive to promote HIVE at this point. It simply could not have happened without you.