RC limits spam, but does not prevent it.
Flags do not eradicate incentives to spam, they are a tool that can limit the effectiveness of spam.
Can you clarify what you mean by "taxation" and "censorship"?
I know of no non-economic incentives for commercial spam. Personally directed spam, such as during a dispute between parties may have other incentives, such as deep and abiding butthurt. There may be other mechanisms potential to reduce such non-economically motivated spam, but I submit that is a tiny fraction of spam and in the vast majority of cases commercial spam that draws flags is quickly and completely dissuaded by the ability of flaggers to completely eliminate any rewards from spam ops.
Just as DV's censor spammers, they censor everyone else that is flagged, too. DV's are taxes because they return rewards to the pool that had been directed to creators exactly as taxes are taken out of your paycheck and returned to the government before you receive it. On Hive everyone with stake can tax anyone to the limit of their stake. Such economic disincentives are a very common mechanism that oppressive governments employ to censor speech, such as fines, and seizing bank accounts, and debanking people that is becoming more and more prevalent. When they are tied to specific speech they often work very well to silence that speech, on Hive and elsewhere. Canada seized bank accounts of people that donated to honking truckers in the attempt to end the Freedom Convoy there, and as I recall that did end it.
Trump has promised John Deere, for example, that if they move their factories to Mexico, they will pay a 200% import duty for their products sold in the USA. Since such taxation is a strong disincentive to do business in ways that are so punitively taxed, when many creators on Hive have been taxed 100% of their earnings, they are similarly discouraged from publishing on Hive. I have provided some such punitively taxed users 5% of my author rewards for years in order to provide them some economic return for their posts that couldn't be taxed to nothing. I have just learned about @commentrewarder, which enables authors to share their author rewards with commenters they upvote on their blogs, which also provides non-taxable income, and am trying that out.
Downvotes are not taxes. Taxes take what is yours. Downvotes adjust the potential payout, which is not yours until it actually pays out. This can be abused, but calling it a "tax" does not make sense.
Just like your rewards, your paycheck isn't yours until you cash it, and it's adjusted through taxation. Just like taxes, DV's return your money to the rewards pool from whence it came, even though people assigned it to you with their upvotes, just like employers assign you pay for your efforts. Taxes and DV's operate identically, only on Hive everyone can tax you.
The only difference is pedantry.
You're still trying to make a comparison that doesn't work. Government takes from what you were paid. Votes (up and down) set the post reward. There is no confiscation and no threat of violence for noncompliance.
You're conjuring up differences where there are none in practice. There's no threat of violence for your paycheck. The government taking your money is no different than Hive DV's. No goons with firearms at the ready stand in the payroll office threatening the paymaster.
It's the exact same effect. It produces the identical result: your money gets taken away. On Hive everybody can tax you to the limit of their stake. That is the effective difference, and that makes Hive much, much worse because that taxation can, and often is, 100% of your earnings.
No vote is the opposite of an upvote. DV's are taxes.
"There's no threat of violence for your paycheck."
You have never had any kind of dispute with the IRS. The end result is always "comply or die." There is no comparison to downvoting.
Until HIVE payout, the rewards are not your money. After payout, no one can skim off the top of your locked earnings. I don't deny there are downvote abusers. We also have vote farmers and AI spammers abusing upvotes. The claim that there is a tax effect from a downvote still does not actually make sense.
You're conflating filing taxes with receiving paychecks. You can have that same confrontation with the IRS over your social media earnings, and this reveals the mixing of apples and oranges in your violence argument. Deductions from your paycheck operate exactly as do DV's.
Regardless of these discussions, the real world has acted to reject all the sophistry and pedantry that tries to obfuscate the catastrophic effects of unrestrained taxation on commercial activity Hive enables social media to become. User retention is worse on Hive than any other surviving social media platform. The market doesn't care about what you say it should do. It responds to market forces, and has rejected DV's as unacceptable parasitism by the rich on the poor. There are literally thousands of farewell posts from the folks that have left. You can read them yourself.
No, deductions from a paycheck are not equivalent to downvotes. The payout period is a week where users can vote up, down, or not at all based on their subjective opinion of the content in question based on whatever principles they choose, an then after payout, that final sum belongs to the author and curators. In contrast, if I agree to accept $X/hr in wages, government elbows in and demands $Y/hr under threat of further theft, kidnapping, or murder for noncompliance. You can dislike downvotes, but there is no comparison to taxes no matter how you try to argue it.
You can keep repeating false information as much as you want. It will not make it true.
Post payouts ARE NOT your money. If they were your money you could have taken the money before 7 days run out. You cant because its NOT YOURS.
DVs ARE NOT taxes.
RC doesn't even remotely limit spam. The largest abusers here have less than 1000 HP and can spam endlessly with little impact on their RC.
The RC system is completely broken and only affects new users usually doing legitimate transactions.
I've brought up a few times about revamping the RC system so it actually does something having scaling costs for operations. So if a single user posts 20 comments, they are fine, but it starts getting incrementally more expensive. This way users who spam 1000 comments a day can't do with impunity. You always have the make another account syndrome though, but RC currently doesn't do jack for any use case it was intended for. With RC delegation it is even easier to get around.
Bpcvoter just started another spam campaign with his various numbered accounts. He can comment his accusations without any issue, but new accounts can't always reply to every comment on their intro posts. The formula needs fixing.