I’ve been a long time reader of DJTT and have personally had mixed responses to this recent change in policy. I came across this talk, and found it to be applicable and insightful to the recent decisions made regarding censorship on this website (specifically, see the section starting at the 12:25 mark, though the entire video is worth watching)
It’s to remove the unproductive crap where people just insult each other. And by liking a comment that reflects your opinion on the article they get a feel for what kind of articles to run…
I support the decision to clean up the comments. God forbid the comments here end up going the YouTube route.
Nothing productive comes of that kind of incessant flaming and shit talking. Actually, the lack of flaming on the boards here is one of the first things I noticed and really liked.
There’s one thing I genuinely don’t get concerning the comments on sites like this or others. Whenever someone decides to moderate or restrict comments, there’s always a bunch of people complaining about “censorship”. Frankly, they do not have the slightest idea about what they are actually saying. Ask someone who lives in a dictatorship country, where people are being imprisoned for writing the wrong books or blogs, how they think about your concept of censorship.
I mean, let’s be honest, there may be many places on the internet where free speech and freedom of information, whatever it’s topic it may be, are the top priority. But the reality is, the net in general is not an overall publicly owned space without rules. If I go some place in the real world, there are rules to follow, too. And if someone decides to piss on my office carpet or insult my guests, i’ll want to have the right to kick him out and not let him back in next time. Why should anyone act differently on his website?
“dislike” can be messed with “I don’t agree with you but you made your point” opinions…
A lot of opinions can be unique and need to be shown to provoke a nice discussion, but when people start to hit “dislike” to people that make a good point but only a small part of the people agree, then we have a community driven censorship.
…To put this waste of time thread into context, I was watching the Clay Shirky video as a source for a research assignment. It reminded me of the “cleaning up the comments” post I read a few days back, so I created this to get feedback on the subject. From your responses here I gather that this has been a beneficial change in policy.
That is why I posted this here, I am interested in your opinions, the opinions of active community members.
Also, if you’re browsing forums and a thread looks like it is of no interest to you and a complete wast of your time (this thread), you don’t have to read it…
I agree with you, I should have phrased that differently. I suppose the term “moderation” would have been more fitting for me to use in this context, I don’t mean to loosely throw this into the realm of “censorship”. Disregard
I appreciate the conversation and insight everyone, thanks
-Butters
Yeah that’s what I was wondering! (granted yeah, this is my first day posting in here…) Usually most forums have some sort of section specific to the website/feedback (“there is not dumb question”), a general on-topic, and a general off-topic.
This was discussed a couple of weeks ago, the problem is that the general discussion forum was created as a place to have OT discussion among other things. Creating an OT forum would quite likely kill off the General Discussion and lead to genuine questions not being answered.
