Dikaios1517 on Nostr: It's not really "censorship in gloves," and your mistake was not merely the number ...

It's not really "censorship in gloves," and your mistake was not merely the number being 5 rather than 4. You were characterizing it as being triggered when "4 friends mute the same person." Mutes have nothing to do with it. Only reports. People mute other users all the time and for all sorts of reasons. Maybe the person just talks about things they aren't interested in, or they got in a heated discussion about something and they need some time to cool off before seeing that user's notes in their feed again, or they like to read a feed of all posts from a certain relay, but there is one bot on that relay that they don't care to see. That being the case, mutes are not used as a criteria by Amethyst for hiding notes from other users.

Reports are much stronger signal, because they indicate that the person is being a jerk in some way. They are posting hateful things, or always using profanity in an abusive way (i.e. "F-you!" instead of "F-yeah!"), or posting sexually explicit images or videos as replies to a discussion about the art of growing bonsai trees, or they're a reply-bot posting about the latest crypto air-drop of some new token that is guaranteed to go to the moon on every post.

Can reports be abused? Absolutely, and that is why filters based on reports can be turned off. Even so, they aren't generally abused and they are very effective for helping users curate the content they actually want to see. Even when they are abused, it rarely actually affects what legitimate users see. Vitor mentioned this when he noted how many accounts have reported him, and yet he is still visible because those accounts aren't followed by any real people, only by other bots and otherwise fake npubs.

It sounds like you are arguing about two different types of people who could be reporting you. The first type would be "an idiot and his gang of fake npubs" or "one anon who holds multiple accounts," and the other type would be "people on Nostr who hold multiple big accounts."

In the case of the anon idiot who has a gang of fake npubs, that won't affect your visibility at all, either on Nostr as a whole, or on Amethyst in particular, just like it doesn't affect Vitor's visibility. If it is just one guy who has an issue with you and he's used his army of fake npubs to report you multiple times, then no one you care about is going to have your posts covered by a warning message, because none of them are following that idiot or his other fake npubs. Barely any real users are going to be following some anon idiot, let alone any fake npubs he's spun up.

Real people with legitimately large followings are another matter. If they report you and other real people who also have decent sized followings report you, then some users who follow those large accounts may see your posts covered with a warning on Amethyst. This isn't going to happen if you are generally respectful and productively contribute to conversations, though. Moreover, it's only going to affect your visibility on Amethyst, and not on all of Nostr, unless another client has implemented a similar filter. If you want to be disrespectful in the way you engage with others, then I don't know what to tell you. People don't want to see posts that are disrespectful, and they will happily take advantage of ways to hide that kind of engagement.

Now, what do you suppose most people do when they see that warning stating, "This post was hidden because it was reported by these people you follow"? Most people let their curiosity get the better of them and they tap on "Show Anyway" to see if it really deserved to be covered with a warning. If they see that the content isn't actually worth covering up, they have the option to go turn the filter off in their settings, or the next time they see the warning they'll just tap "Show Anyway" again. The point is, the individual user has control over what they see, not the people who reported you.

It might be very different if Amethyst just hid the post entirely, without any hint in the UI that it existed at all. But that's not what Vitor and the other Amethyst devs did. They made it obvious that a note had been covered with a warning AND provided a quick and easy means to reveal it immediately. They even show exactly which users reported the post, so you know if the person who posted it is just being ganged up on by large accounts, or if they're just generally a bad actor.