RE: Censorship (or, the lack thereof), moderation, and the future of reading.
To make it more explicit, one of the things you are asking for comment on is this piece on the roadmap (pdf):
Feature: Comment moderation for post authors.
Which is what you're referencing in #3 of your not-censorship list:
People disagreeing with you and denying you access to their audience.
My response,
The incentive to abuse Steem is undeniable. The simplest way people abuse it are copy/pasting text from elsewhere as if they've written it. This is plagiarism, and plagiarism needs to be discouraged as best as possible on Steem. Why? Because we want real people to participate, we want creators and people who share themselves. Incentivizing scammers will only bring more scammers and reinforce scammers' habits.
A large and useful part of @anyx's @cheetah bot's ability is its automatic text checking. If similar text is found on the web, cheetah will leave a comment linking to what it found. Furthermore, it's often users who find abuse and leave a comment in the post. Giving post authors moderation power will empower abusers to remove comments indicating abuse.
There are other instances when it's beneficial to notify everyone viewing a post about a scam a poster may be trying to bait people into. If you've ever used bitcointalk.org, you should know that any self-moderated thread should be read with that in mind.
Steemit in many ways has been modeled after Reddit, and while we don't need to follow their model as a dogma (as we haven't), I do think Reddit's lack of own-post comment moderation is a good thing. Comments that get downvoted enough get sorted to the bottom, and there is an account option to choose at what threshold of negative karma they simply get hidden.
That's not to say I don't see any value in allowing own-comment moderation. Certainly there is value in legitimate posters removing actual useless trolling from their posts. But so far in Steemit's life, I would say the amount of trolling has been low enough that giving post authors ability to completely remove comments isn't an emergency. The incentives of Steem makes Steemit a target of abuse. My concern with this proposed change is that it may create more of a problem than it solves.
Perhaps it can be filtered in combination with reputation score? say, if you, the author, has a higher rep score than the author of a reply, you can remove it. Just think out loud..
All of these ideas are potentially valuable, and it's good to brainstorm. :)
Is there harm in finding out? It's always possible to turn it back off if it sucks.
There is obviously big upside in allowing authors more control over what types of content have access to their audience. Many bloggers will not blog on sites that permit commenting by anyone.
It is possible to get the best of both worlds by allowing authors to turn on or off this feature on a per-post basis, along with a per-account default. Those authors who want to control comments can do so (along with an indicator to readers the comments being shown are moderated by the author) and those who do not want to control comments can convey to readers that the comments being shown are not subject to author moderation.
This, of course, comes at a cost: additional UI complexity and the need for somehow getting this mental model we've just spent several hundred words describing into the minds of every author who uses the interface. I'm not entirely sold on the benefits of additional customization outweighing the downsides of additional complexity. We are determined to build the simplest possible thing that can work.
Mental model in six words: "Click here to enable comment moderation"
Okay what about viewer-preference? I'd prefer the default-mode to be the uncensored view. Then the other mode would be the "comments censored by post owner" view.
Anyone should be able to leave a note, so to speak. Resteemed..
It is possible that you want this default only because neonazis haven't heard of steemit.com yet. I come from the seedy underbelly of the internet and know that the only reason we don't have problems with content right now is because of how small we are, and fully expect people to spam all sorts of terrible crap on every article posted soon.
It is my personal opinion that we should give an author 100% control over what gets displayed underneath their words, lest they go and publish their words somewhere else (almost every other blogging platform on the planet gives an author this control).
If our decision is wrong, then people will flock to busy.org (or some other site that doesn't lets authors moderate) instead, won't they?
It's a design that makes sense - just worried about the points, similar to what @pfunk has brought up.
I'll take your word for it, I can imagine how bad it can get :)