I wrote this post last Saturday. (https://stacker.news/items/1478995)
It's about a particular type of torture used regularly in Israeli prisons on Palestinian prisoners. Most people will find this type of torture...well, inhumane doesn't even begin to cover it. Check out the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqAe9KGmdu8.
But my point here is not to talk about the actual torture, gruesome though it is.
It's to talk about the censorship that it received.
It was very quickly downzapped 5,000 sats. That's enough to make it completely disappear from the LIT ranking, no matter how much you scroll down.
You can review downzaps yourself by looking here: (https://stacker.news/top/posts/week?by=downsats). And you'll notice something interesting.
https://m.stacker.news/139552
The top 3 downzaps for the week are crazy high amounts (total 64,000 sats of downzaps) against 3 innocuous posts, that got zero traction. About bitcoin art, of all things.
But the reason for downzaps on the first three posts was NOT because somebody has a vendetta against bitcoin art. Instead, it's to obscure the real target of the downzap campaign - which is anything that is anti Iran war or anti Zionist. To make it not so blatantly obvious.
This decoy strategy started when I started posting "top weekly downzap" posts like this one
Again! Heavy downzapping of anti Zionist, anti Iran War messages](https://stacker.news/items/1473177) (that post itself was downzapped more than 19K sats).
Propaganda battle raging here on Stacker News over Israel and Iran War (downzapped 3133 sats)
Reminder - anti Iran war posts on Stacker.news are getting heavily downzapped (downzapped 42 sats)
Since it was becoming very obvious what the actual target of the downzapping was, the downzapper figured that they'd better become more subtle, and obscure the actual target by downzapping other non-political posts crazy high amounts.
What can you do? Be aware that you're being censored. Regularly check downzaps (https://stacker.news/top/posts/day?by=downsats). Check for the day, and check for the week, month.
You can also install the browser extension that I wrote, specifically to highlight the downzap censorship issue on Stacker News - Installing Stacker News Downzap Spotlight
It provides a DOWNZAPS link on the main menu bar, so you can easily see the top downzaps per day. Also it shows the amount of downzaps, without having to dig deep into the details of the post
FYI - here's an earlier post I wrote, with more details of what types of posts get downzapped - https://stacker.news/items/1453201
@88b0c423eb
@BlokchainB
@sezar
@chaoticalHeavy
@siggy47
@Undisciplined
@0xbitcoiner
@Taft
I suggest you pay attention to when a post is boosted. The first three art posts were each boosted 10k, 20k, and 30k sats each.
I suspect that someone did not like seeing the front page so dominated by boosted posts and downzapped them to reduce the power of their boosts.
Rather than jumping to the conclusion that there is some grand conspiracy, realize that SN is a group of people who all express opinions via sats about what they want to see.
Maybe. But I doubt it.
I think a more likely explanation is that the strategy has become more sophisticated. This is not the first time I've posted about the "decoy downszaps".
Check out this post #1473885
Nobody is censoring you on SN.
SN is a "pay to post", and "pay to vote". Simple as that.
Like Scoresby said: are just people voting with their sats. It's a huge difference. If those that downzap your posts heavily do not appreciate so much the value of their sats, so be it, be happy, in the end you get them back from rewards.
Seems that you still don't understand how SN works...
I highly doubt it. It's not a conspiracy. It's opinions.
decoy downzaps?
Hmm at some point they will run out of sats no?
Depends on who's doing it.
There have been some very aggressive downzapping campaigns, going to more than 300k sats, that were downzapped to keep them off the main feed, and then @Solomonsatoshi was upzapping them to counteract that. These were all on anti Iran War, anti Zionist content.
Did you ask if k00b would incorporate what your browser extension does, natively? I don’t love installing random browser extensions
I've pinged him on a couple comments.
I don't think that just incorporating my extension into stacker news is the best idea overall, it was just my immediate reaction to realizing how much censorship was ongoing.
I just want to see the whole topic discussed - the fact that it's trivial for someone with a lot of sats to completely bury posts on a topic that they don't want discussed. Any topic, not just anti Iran War, anti Zionist posts, but absolutely anything.
The default for 99% of users is for this censorship to be invisible, and I believe something needs to change.
Regarding the safety of the browser extension - I think browser extensions are safer than almost any other software, because you can actually read the code (this is not an extension that's packaged on the google webstore, you put it in manually).
You don't even need to understand javascript very well, it's mostly understandable on it's own. If you look in the manifest file, you'll see that it ONLY matches stacker.news, so that's the only one it can act on. And there's no special permissions requested (cookies, downloads, etc).
@k00b
It’d be cool if there was an official extension repository for Stacker News.
It’s interesting how the cost of censorship is being paid in sats.
If someone is willing to burn 64k sats just to bury art posts as cover, it shows how much they value controlling the narrative.