Censored by Steemit

In August 2016 I joined Steem after a tip-off by @the-bitcoin-dood that it was interesting. We had both been using Tsu, a centralised platform paying users from advertising, which had just shut down due to lack of funds. I was a little reluctant to dive into a new platform immediately, but the fact that it was based on a blockchain and did not require advertising intrigued me. It looked like a more sustainable model that would be hard to shut down. Back then there was only the Steemit site, but it soon expanded to multiple dapps.

Over 3 years later @Steemit boss Ned Scott sold the business to Justin Sun who has a mixed up reputation as a crypto entrepreneur. The Steem community who have done most of the work in making the platform viable were suspicious, especially when they heard Justin saying he wanted to migrate it to his Tron chain. Their action of temporarily blocking the Steemit stake was to give them time to negotiate a way forward, but Justin exploited some exchanges to grab control. Since then the only witnesses who get to mine blocks are those with his approval as Steemit use their stake to vote them in.

After the Hive fork those witnesses forced through a hard fork that stole the funds of several witnesses. I know the funds were hijacked, but have not heard what happened in the end.

Steemit also started censoring accounts. Ostensibly this was to 'protect the blockchain'. Okay, so some people were spamming the feeds and being abusive, but the system is designed to cope with that. You can downvote accounts to obscurity. I did carry on posting for a while whilst trying to avoid 'shitposting'. I was not going to recycle old posts just for rewards. I know others did quite well from that and some may still be doing it, but since some of the auto-voting services shut down this has been less profitable. I also commented a bit, but did not get abusive. I just pointed out that they had some issues with some big accounts really 'milking' the rewards. Some use multiple accounts and buy votes to get thousands of Steem each week. Nobody seems to be downvoting them.

I accepted I was not going to earn much Steem as even my comments would get downvoted to nothing. Today I saw there was a change and now my account is censored. When Steemit do this it affects Steempeak too. I did still earn a few Steem by curating posts by people I know who are mainly on Hive.

I had already used Steempruner to redirect all my old posts to Hive, so there was not much content anyway. It is just a little sad to see this happen. I was not a big threat to Steemit as I only have a few thousand SP left and that will be gone in a couple of weeks. They refused to respond to my comments.

So I will not be commenting on Steem any more as people will not see these anyway. I join an illustrious club of people like @themarkymark, @rolandp, @joythewanderer, @pfunk and many more who have a high reputation and lots of followers, but no visible content on Steem. It will still be on the blockchain as you can see on steemd. Direct links may still work.

There are less and less reasons to use Steem now. You may be able to milk it by buying votes, but how long until the Steem token loses value? Justin may be able to prop it up along with some of his wealthier friends. It pains me to see the platform turn to shit like this, but anything on the internet must be considered ephemeral, even blockchains. I have hopes that Hive has a better future. Nobody holds enough stake to highjack all the witnesses. We have the biggest dapps like @splinterlands and a community who cares about building something better. We still have a long way to go, but I will be sticking around to see what happens.

Steem is dead, long live Hive!