Hello @bashadow; I was surprised and saddened to read these things you've written about @curangel. I was there when @curangel was created; in fact, the internal voting code had its very first origins in another bot which I had written and operated for a benevolent purpose here on Hive (which was still called Steem then).

I understand what you're saying when you lump us in with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and that crowd. It would appear, yes, that there is a decent amount of community voting power behind @curangel, both via delegations and on our trails, and we do strive to use that responsibly, for both positive and negative curation. From the outside, I understand how it may appear to you that we are some shadowy monolith under the control of an ancient and unholy power cabal.

So, who wields the downvote cannon? Not the administration (except when acting in terms of their own delegated stake, if any), and not curators either. When @curangel first opened to delegators, we allowed them to submit downvotes into an automated queue, which would then be exercised with their share of whatever power was available at the time. Our aim was to only control what the delegated stake was upvoting, and leave downvoting to the individual delegators. So, you see, our initial goal was to make our downvoting as decentralised as possible.

Unfortunately, over time, it became clear that this model could not stand. We were attracting negative attention as an organisation from people who didn't understand what was going on, or just didn't care about what we were trying to do with regards to keeping our delegators' downvote power in their own hands. It was clear that a change was needed. At that point, we moved to an opt-in whitelist system for access to the downvote tool.

While our guidelines for the downvote tool now clearly discourage personally- or ideologically-motivated downvotes, humans are humans, bias exists, and sometimes, something gets submitted for a downvote that some of us think shouldn't have been. The leadership is then in the position of balancing its trust in those whitelisted delegators (who, all in all, seem to make decent choices most of the time) against the other aims of the organisation. Sometimes this means a retraction is in order, as it was in this case.

What you've done in this post is, you've accused us of something to which most, if not all of us at @curangel (being members of the crypto community after all) are diametrically opposed, and accused us of being something which we are not. I admire the spirit of such an open letter in defence of what you feel is right, but we were informed of this incident only when one of our delegators raised the alarm about this post himself. I would have far more greatly admired your dropping by in our Discord for a civil discussion. I assure you, we're not YouTube.