I try to stay out of arguments, but I think your point is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, in fact so important after this post, you get my witness vote for calling out potential corruption.

They have cartelized authority, if you really think about it as they represent a plurality and their interests. It opens the door for their power and influence to be abused and thus gate-keep the community. Their response was deeply disturbing. For an authority wielding some level of power to cast HARSH aspersions (even the use of defamatory terms that can hurt brand value - especially in the case that larger organizations join the community and cross their path), misgender a user in the case where the gender had already been established between the two parties, refuse to answer important questions, and not maintain neutrality. With great power comes great responsibility.

The main objective should be to protect people from actual fraudsters putting in phishing and malware links and so forth, not to curate and judge content. Let the actual users make that call as to whether content is good enough. If it is good enough to the user to earn an upvote, give that deserved upvote and if there is not enough traction, the content creator needs to make adjustments.

I syndicate my content and source my news sources with all properties (unless I am the actual source - nobody is going to accuse corporate media who syndicate articles across numerous publications of plagiarism). I am willing to sacrifice the control of keeping everything in-house from analytics to form creation to be a part of this community with all of my properties. I saw a massive opportunity to provide this community with sports previews and sourced news for their own convenience, I want to deliver more value to my readers by providing even better content. I wanted to keep things tight and targeted as far as content creation per account. No confusion, no disorganization, you know what you are going to get. Not everything starts far along the roadmap, sometimes you have to start at the 0.0.1 version and I operate with that understanding as well.

I love the interactivity that is in the SportsTalkSocial and DunkSocial communities. I want to provide more value to them. The DunkSocial community wants more dedicated news coverage, it provides legitimacy to a young community that has so much potential.

I want to give people what they want for all my entities and if users/readers tell me they want something different, I'm responsive to it. It makes everything better and it encourages others.

However, because of the actions of a powerful few acting on "good intentions"... they may not be able to get it because it offends their sensibilities or their standards and practices.

Given the lack of professionalism, neutrality, tolerance, and accountability of the enforcement arm of the Hive community ... I can definitely see how this can sow distrust.

The personalization and emotional reactions from this enforcement organization are alarming and @apshamilton, your question and demands are quite generous to them considering that this particular organization even went down the political rabbit hole under their own volition in the first place. They made an unnecessary comment that could even be considered a throwaway, but it was enough to question their authority and judgment. They are a powerful representative of the community, they are supposed to help make this place better...

Their Discord pokes holes in the idea that they are just a small group with downvoting power as they project themselves to be something FAR MORE and given that a witness bent the knee to them on Discord, they certainly wield a lot more power than you would want to admit.

Is the below representative of the community? Is this becoming of a protectorate neutral party with authority looking out for the best interests of Hive?

They do claim to have power to throw people off Hive and claim authority.