Hey mark. Thanks for taking the time to leave a thoughtful response. I'd like to reciprocate the favour.

Perhaps you're right and I am over-reacting. I was pretty mad when I posted this, but I'm still glad that I did.

It may not be censorship in the strictest sense of the word, but in my opinion still acts as a proxy for that if it leads to less people seeing my content and 90% of my income being lost in a post with a single downvote. It's not much different to the adpocalypse on YouTube and all the demonetisation that occurred - which is why I came to be such a fan of Steem in the first place. To see the same thing over again here is immensely frustrating to say the least.

It isn't a one-off, as 3 of my posts in the past week have been downvoted and I've lost 90% of the rewards. The scary thing for me is that I have absolutely no idea how long this will last for. Is it gonna be a permanent thing? Am I effectively gonna lose half my income from now on?

Steem has been very good to me, which I'm very appreciate of. But you have to ask - if a large crypto YouTuber can't make a great income on Steem, then who on earth can? And when you consider that 50% of rewards go to curators, I'm left with approx $15USD worth of rewards per post, often for videos that take 6-8 hours to produce. Is that excessive and worthy of being downvoted? In my personal opinion, no.

And just to clarify - I have made exclusive posts for Steem on multiple occasions. And I have to pay a monthly fee to upload to @3Speak, which I'm more than happy to do. And I've made several videos about Steem that have led to adoption. So I absolutely consider myself someone who has invested a lot into this platform.