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On free speech in forums

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urlwolf:
Here, we have complained before about forums owners removing threads that criticize their products.
Well, here's a long post by Steve Pavlina trying to justify this behavior.

What I thought after reading this is: In such a situation, it's easy to grow your authority online! If you have an army of moderators that remove bad comments and pump up good ones, then new forum members will only see how much other members love their leader!

This is also the case when newspapers give you only one side of the news. I guess it's common practice. Was I too naive to expect that maybe on the internet things would be different?

What we desperately need is a reputation mechanism that sticks. We have solved spam (mostly). We could very well have a public currency that gets burn out when you say stupid things and gets inflated when you say useful things. In fact, Scott Adams is aiming in that direction too.

What do you think?

Curt:
I think that the hole idea, that the Internet includes 'the Right to Free Speech', is naive, and probably founded on ignorance. The tend is also the opposite, I think; more and more hosts being forced to practice moderation and censorship. My expectation is that this will grow and grow, until it no longer is a question about what kind of homepage / site you would want to have, but if you want to have a homepage at all!

---
BTW:
Well, here's a long post by Steve Pavlina ...
-urlwolf (October 10, 2009, 04:59 AM)
--- End quote ---
in the long run http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/09/free-speech-in-online-communities-the-delusion-of-entitlement/ is a better link.

tinjaw:
What we desperately need is a reputation mechanism that sticks.
-urlwolf (October 10, 2009, 04:59 AM)
--- End quote ---

Cory Doctorow's Whuffiew  8)

tranglos:
Here, we have complained before about forums owners removing threads that criticize their products.
Well, here's a long post by Steve Pavlina trying to justify this behavior.
-urlwolf (October 10, 2009, 04:59 AM)
--- End quote ---

Steve Pavlina, I almost forgot about him, the blogger who blogs about how much money he makes from blogging about himself and his blog! Ever long-winded just like myself :)

Basically he seems to be using a lot of words to say "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one", which is certainly a correct observation, if somewhat cynical. But he seems to forget, unless he owns his physical delivery infrastructure, that the site he calls his isn't really, because it's most likely hosted at another commercial entity, who will exercise the same rights he enjoys. A bigger fish than him, or a whole school of smaller fishes, can get Steve disconnected for his online speech almost as easily as he can moderate comments on his blog. In the end it's his legal budget against the legal budget of his ISP and whoever owns them.

There are likely lawyers and management types who will flock to pay for Steve Pavlina's wisdom, and that's just a shame, but what can you do.

Paul Keith:
What we desperately need is a reputation mechanism that sticks.
--- End quote ---

The concept is already out there. It's just not designed with forums particularly in mind.

CoComment, Disqus, OpenID, etc.

In the case of forums, it's basically the profile on your account and what website you associate it with.

Even the situation with admins is tech idiot fixable as long as you can convince a blog authority to link to your article on why x author's reputation is horrible.

It's still your community vs. the site's fans and controversy could just increase pageviews for said person's site but if the criticism is valid and enormous and it is spread correctly through the different social media services and voted by a group of bloggers, it's a reputation mechanism that's better than the best reputation mechanism because it's socially constructed and not technologically constructed.

Not to mention that any technological construct if it aims to be open and neutral is just as open and neutral to the "tyranny of the majority" and any closed system is no different from what Pavlina and Curt alludes to except the cheek is turned. Won't really stick or if it does, still not really credible.

Edit: Most importantly groups already put their votes in Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Stumbleupon and other mini-sites like RateitAll that it's not that there's no reputation mechanism that doesn't stick from a technological perspective.

It's that the technological reputation mechanisms have no mind reading filter that warns you: "this site is not a phishing site but it's admin is a douche that is 80% incompatible with your free, independent and passionate personality"

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