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The case for and against Censorship on the forum

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TaoPhoenix:

Good opening effort Iain, and I've seen your posts, you're one of the people I thought of who puts work into them!  :Thmbsup:

One of my amusing mini hobbies is to make semi-scientific charts and diagrams of stuff. There's one going on here. Consider a Tree diagram - either vertically or horozontally is fine - that starts out with The Communication Medium Subset Content Guidelines. Here, the Communication Medium is all of DC, but this analysis applies to basically anything, from public parks to malls.

Branch #1: Governmental vs Corporate

This means that "Free Speech" works profoundly differently in Government controlled Public Areas vs Company controlled venues. Not counting sleaziness, playing it straight up, Free Speech is all that stuff you learned in 5th grade. Say what you want, don't call Fire in a movie theater, no slander/libel/harmful intent/etc. Otherwise - THEORETICALLY - you can say what you want.

All the rules change in Company controlled. (Even if Mouser doesn't have a Biz name, it's still his ballpark, basically still Company controlled, such as a sole proprietorship.)  Then it's all TOS/Code of Conduct/etc. Put fairly simply, there is more censorship on all Company controlled venues. How much then goes into the branches below.

Branch #2: "Acceptible vs Not Acceptible".
I basically disposed of this for the Government areas above. For Company controlled areas, it's all about the Company's vision of what they are offering. This ranges all the way from zero monitored areas that can indeed include a bad trolling culture, yet even that is at the edges of the entire concept of speech. There are some ways to handle that, but nothing's perfect.

There's various ranges of light-medium moderation, with 1000 different styles. You get a medium-good environment.

Then there are tightly controlled environments doing the whole "Family Friendly thing Safe For Kids". AOL used to be famous for that, Facebook might be today.

TaoPhoenix:
The Tightly Controlled environments lead all to the discussions we just saw. The Power(s) That Be judge each post as Acceptible or Not Acceptible. You get a Disneyfied environment that's all warm and full of little marshmallow hearts, and who doesn't like marshmallow hearts? What's that? You don't? You Must Be A Terrorist! ... Sorry.

So then some percentage of people get tired of Pleasantville and want to actually wrestle with a topic. So they leave the Garden of Eden and hit any of the thousands of light to medium controlled venues. The owners of these places try a couple of different strategies to keep total ruin at bay. Slashdot uses Two Tiered Moderation, other places Vote Up and Down, while whole sets of other places just rely on judgement of the owner. That's what we have here.

The moderation strategy in its simplest is All or Nothing, sometimes with warnings. A better version is what we're leaning toward here, making the rest of the board fairly tightly modded but with the Living Room and even a Soap Box etc as pressure valves.

Then, just for completeness, are forums that have lost control and bad elements have crept in. They are important outliers of the Speech question, but only in a limited corner case sense.

So where I see this discussion is whether at a medium level Mouser starts to decide to delete any posts, and/or threaten with a warning, vs create a looser final enclave where they can go short of pure trolling.

Over to you all.

mouser:
Some quick personal thoughts:

I try to think about forum policies in terms of balancing different goals that are occasionally in conflict, and in shades of gray.

The forum serves multiple functions.

It's a community where all of us regulars like to talk to one another about whatever is going on in our lives and about our ideas, etc. -- totally unrelated to software, technology, etc.

It's also a place where new visitors come for help and guidance on technical issues -- on software that we make but also on other technology problems.

This is obvious but it bears repeating: The forum is not the only place to talk on the internet.  In fact many of us regulars hang out in the irc chat room and talk till all hours of the night about whatever pops into our heads (politics, jokes, programming, employment, etc.).  And the internet is filled with wonderful political blogs and all sorts of different forums.

So I do think there is value in having a tangible kind of focus, flavor, spirit, mood, energy on this forum that is different from most others.  I don't want our forum to turn into something that looks like all the others.  And I'm very sensitive to the danger of our discussions becoming insular -- becoming just us regulars talking to ourselves and not being an inviting place for new visitors.

So for me, I don't see an issue of censorship as much as I see us trying to formulate a set of guidelines and principles that helps us keep this forum open, inviting, and, for lack of a better word, specialized.

I am warming though to the idea of setting up a special section (soap box) which is slightly off the beaten track here -- such that there should be no concern that discussions there would detract in any way from the main general public sections.

I think perhaps that is the crux of the dilemna here -- that with only one public "Living Room", there is some pressure to ensure that it reflect well on the site and be inviting and representative of the focus of the site.  But if we allow a "Soap Box" area where anything goes (politics, etc.) then perhaps that would not be an issue.

Having said that -- I think a great deal of the charm of this forum is that we share a common experience -- that we aren't broken up into little enclaves.  So I think it would be important that the soap box not become a kind of alternate forum inside a forum where there is no shared experience.

TaoPhoenix:
Good start Mouser.

Though there still aren't that many divisions.

Iain, sorry for your thread - that was just one of many signature topics that start these kinds of topic shifts, and very often with a "this is not appropriate" remark from someone, both owner and member.

Mouser, you need to decide if the Living Room itself can handle the heat, and really, or then if for fear of getting warnings everyone leaves the Living room for the Soap Box, that's a signal. If you put a quick guideline to save the Soap Box for topics *especially* expected to be controversial, then that helps avoid cheapening the Soap Box itself! Then all the usual Kitiez and Music Videos and stuff is classic Living Room faire, but religious topics are famously Soap Box.

Be careful, the Soap Box WILL get a little light trolling, but then that's someone pushing the edges to be sure the middle is safe.

mouser:
I think you said it pretty well Tao.
Let's give the Soap Box idea a try, and see what happens: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=311.0

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