I've been an active blogger on Hive coming from Steemit and have really enjoyed the platform being a 'free speech' resort especially with the increased censorship on social media giants the likes of Facebook, Twitter, et al, until last month.
I do run my own website since 2011 and I have been covering the events in my country, Syria, ever since the first massacre and first riot committed by US-sponsored heavily armed 'peaceful protesters' who also happens to carry the most advanced satellite communication devices, sniper rifles, machetes, and chant slogans like we'll slaughter you and your family if you don't join our peaceful protesters, and they actually did that in a number of towns and neighborhoods all across the country, just like how their sponsors would tolerate their likes in London, New York, and Paris.
Imagine the protesters in one of those 3 NATO major cities carrying satellite communication devices unsanctioned by the government's regulators in those countries, connected with real foreign 'intelligence' agencies, say Russia, and carrying machetes on the streets, chopping off some heads of other people after they ask them about their religions and whether they support their peaceful protests, and one of their leaders carve out the heart of an NYPD policeman, on camera, after killing him, on camera, and starts chewing his heart, on camera, and threatening the rest who do not follow his 'peaceful' movement of the same fate, on camera, then all the media in Russia, in this case, and the Russian officials call him a 'freedom fighter' and denounce the NYPD, in this example, if they try to arrest this guy.
This is exactly what we've seen on our streets, not to mention the suicide bombers, the entire villages massacres, the throwing of policemen and public employees off the rooftops of buildings for the crime of reporting to work and each time without fail the US officials and their media, and that of their NATO partners and Gulfies, demonize our police and armed forces, our government, and our people who stood up to these low-level subhumans let loose on our streets, whom most of which were shipped into our country from all over the planet were called 'Syrian opposition' and 'peaceful protesters', who went to the extent of carrying out several incidents of chemical attacks against our troops and our cities and the NATO clan accuse our army of killing their family members while Al Qaeda terrorists in our country are there to protect those people...
There are thousands of video reports, pictures, and testimonials we have documented throughout the past decade, and we've been systematically silenced by social media giants, our narrative oppressed in favor of the NATO narrative to justify another invasion based on lies which they've done before, multiple times.
Platforms like Hive, in its early days, served as a place where the voices of my people were spread despite the overwhelming opposite narrative, then comes a few whales here who dislike what I'm doing and work on to suppress my voice as well.
One of them, (bloocktrades), who happens to be the top witness on Hive as well, said that they downvoted one of my posts because in their view NATO should not be criticized..! Even Russia is not our ally, as if we were relying on Russia to defend our country over the first 4 years until the Russian president himself repeated 3 times that 'if the Russian forces didn't go to Syria to fight the terrorists, they'll have to fight them on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersberg', ironically, that's what happened in Almaty in Kazakhstan last week.
For me, before someone would jump and say downvotes are not equal to censorship, are literally gradual censorship, just watch this post over the course of the coming 7 days to find out what I mean.
Another whale, (azircon), who amassed near a million HP set an automatic bot that downvotes my posts with 100% of their HP 10 hours before they're due for reward collection, thus stripping the author and curators rewards and taking off some of my account's reputation built over the past 4.25 years.
This whale claims that I'm engaging in 'dangerous propaganda' because he has been into northern Syria and have played football with ISIS and Al Qaeda there and found that they are good guys who play baseball and Ameican football better than the Syrians who play soccer, those fighting these 'good guys', in his views, are the bad ones, therefore, no criticism of ISIS or its enablers is allowed, by his standards. - Just an FYI: entering another country's territories without a visa is a crime whether being embedded with another country's army or with Al Qaeda...
With Moderate Rebels Like These Who Needs Terrorists?*
Another bot (steemcleaners) has a job of downvoting all my posts once other bloggers start upvoting them; in my early days with steemit, this bot was supposed to verify identity theft, and my account was verified back in 2017.
The 4th bot (logic) has no logic at all in downvoting the posts, just like that.
Then came two bots who are supposed to uphold the integrity of Hive and who were doing a good job until this post (@arabisouri/repost-previous-post-censored-by-hive-whales-syrian-and-russian-air-forces-destroy-near-6000-hospitals-in-idlib), (adm) and (Hivewatchers).
While (adm) did not comment on why they downvoted my post, the (Hivewatchers) claimed it's because they deemed it as spam, reposting posts is not allowed even if one embeds the previous post to show that no wrong was done, adding 3 times the media content over the previous post and more than 50% new content... and even after appealing in the discord channel, it was useless, taking in consideration that this was the only post I have in more than 2500 posts throughout the past 4.25 years that was ever marked as spam!
Ok, enough whining on my part, I'm not going to discuss the different tactics followed by some whales to make their money like voting on accounts of the same circle of friends with the massive HP they got and then selling their Hives after they powerdown which somehow happens when the Hive price goes up... I'm not an expert to discuss this issue, let those who can come up with the stats check it up.
Other things I'm not going to discuss as well, I'll leave it to those concerned.
I'm just informing the other Hive bloggers who believed in this system to not put all their eggs in one basket, stay vigilant, you'll never know on which day some whales strip you of your Hives and strip your posts' curators as well, and start targeting you based on their 'free speech' guidelines, ie: what to write, how to think, and how to interact with the platform they are milking while the rest of the 'commons' make peanuts in comparison. Hive is a blockchain-based blogging platform connected with a token, strip it from its token and it's another tumblr with more restrictions.
Leave objective comments, if you can, and please, for the second time, do not try to convince me that downvoting is not equal to censorship, it's worse.