I wanted to highlight an example of someone being blacklisted on Hive to show how transparent a truly decentralized social platform is with censorship and that everything is still accessible, and their account isn’t actually banned.

The reason I think it’s important to review this case is because there are other platforms that do have the power to ban your account outright and more importantly, take away your access to your funds. In fact, most platforms have this power. This is why decentralization is so important and patronizing platforms like Hive should be a high priority. LBRY is very decentralized too but their reward model isn’t. Which essentially makes Hive the most decentralized social media platform I know of and this case of what happens when you do something illegal and not just against their terms of service highlights that perfectly.

Note that only a small handful of people have ever been blacklisted and that it is then up to individual interfaces to decide to follow those recommendations. To be clear, Hive is the bottom layer, the network that everything runs on and where all the transactions and content exist. On top of that, you have the interfaces which are built by anyone to be used by anyone which various filters and designs. You can access Hive via the direct raw blockchain by viewing it on a platform like Hiveblocks or you can use interfaces like Hive.blog or PeakD to access that information with a much better viewing experience.

The @TheDarkOverlord Case:

This is an example case of what lite censorship happens on Hive when someone who breaks the law is blacklisted.

When @thedarkoverlord was blacklisted, interfaces decided whether or not to censor their content on their front ends. This means that they could still access their funds and account because it’s decentralized, and they aren’t actually banned.

This is one of many articles discussing this when it happened in 2019: https://heavy.com/news/2019/01/the-dark-overlord-update-banned-steemit-twitter-reddit/

This is what his profile looks like on PeakD with everything censored: https://peakd.com/@thedarkoverlord/posts This is an example of a post made by @thedarkoverlord that was removed from most front end interfaces but still is accessible on the blockchain forever: https://hiveblocks.com/thedarkoverlord/@thedarkoverlord/9-11-papers-megaleak-layer-2-checkpoint-08-cyber-cash-for-cyber-cache

Here we can see everything this account has ever done and everything they wrote immutably on the blockchain: https://hiveblocks.com/@thedarkoverlord

This is the original change made on Steem to blacklist these accounts: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/commit/cdf56507e11f367f6decc42a6c059c2d30db9cf4#diff-053314b97424482264fe65a167e32a3efd647fd5c3867ca9d14e81993f089955

By setting things up this way Hive ensures that you have full control of your account, your funds, and that everyone can see what happens to both. It’s about as transparent as you can possibly get for a social media platform and I encourage everyone to use it.

Do you prefer decentralized social media? Are you using Hive or LBRY? Let me know what is most important for you before using a social media platform. Share what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!

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