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I disagree. A central authority (or even ostensibly decentralized ones like Reddit power mods) making the decision to make content harder to find still fits neatly under "censorship".
But it's explicitly not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about social media companies deprioritizing content regardless of and/or because of it's popularity.
I was thinking specifically of the reddit Powermods and their clique with that comment, along with SRS - mass downvoting was one of the ways that they got started manipulating content on Reddit. I am not sure how much further this conversation can go productively - our disagreement largely appears to do with terminology.
Coordinated downvoting is lame, but it's not that much of an issue. In a fair system a counter-coalition would form, and compensate or retaliate. The problem with the power mods is that they delete posts and ban people that say things they don't like (I've seen screenshots where posts saying harmless things like "hey, isn't it crazy that 20 people control the majority of top 500 subreddits?" get deleted, and the person banned). The other issue is their influence over admins, which allow them to ban entire subreddits with "wrong" opinions, and prevent a counter-coalition from forming.
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