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On free speech in forums

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40hz:
Agreed 40hz but in my reply to trianglos, I was referring specifically to the application of graduated permissions in opinionated forums and tech support forums.

(I'm not sure you understood that so I just repeated what I said.)
-Paul Keith (October 10, 2009, 03:57 PM)
--- End quote ---

I didn't. Or more correctly, I missed it.

I also agree with you about graduated permissions being a bad idea.

You're on the bus - or off the bus! is the way I run my life and my business*. Once you're made part of the circle, you're welcome to come around any time. I'll even give you a key to the door (house or office) if you want one. Everybody else gets to call and make an appointment.


Ditto websites. The way I see it, if I set certain conditions in order to gain full access -  and the person complies - then they'll immediately get the whole 9-yards without further ado. A deal is a deal. And it stays that way unless this person gets stupid and deliberately starts violating the social contract they agreed to abide by. At which point, they'll usually (depending on the problem) get a warning (or two) before they get shown the door.

---

* I'm a Boomer. Does that surprise you?  :mrgreen:

mouser:
It is one thing to realize a fault in human character (a lot of people won't behave fairly if they don't have to, but have something to gain). It is a completely different thing however to espouse and promote unfair behavior as the basis on which to build your life or your business.
--- End quote ---

well said.

mouser:
getting back to the original question..

just some quick thoughts:

I can see why someone running a business or website with a forum could be concerned about abusively critical posts; I think one has to remember that the majority of people reading posts on a forum are not long term readers who will take the time to read everything and educate themselves, so there is the very real fear that some new person will find such posts (especially through a search) and make a very negative snap judgement.  And of course this issue becomes much more real if you have someone with a grudge determined to exploit these facts and trying to harm your reputation.

However, the idea of removing normal honest negative criticism is essentially declaring that the forum is not a place for open discussion of benefits and weaknesses.  It is declaring that if people want honest balanced discussion of your product or ideas, they will have to go elsewhere.  And it puts on notice anyone who might otherwise be a long term participant, that this forum is *not* a place where they can express dissenting views freely.

Now such a forum may still serve a useful purpose -- such as to provide tech or sales support.  It's just not going to be a very interesting community forum, and shouldn't be presented as such.

Life is much more interesting if you let people speak their mind and disagree with you, and let a forum be a place of record to share different views.  It's true that sometimes the cost for this is a bit of occasional vitriol and something that could scare off a random drive-by reader, but that's life.  And rather than see such threads as things to be deleted and hidden, it seems to me far better to treat them as opportunities to reassert the value of open discourse.

rgdot:
Free speech is not harmed or rendered useless so long as everybody realizes that one person, anonymous or not, does not wisdom make.
If I read one negative review of a product it doesn't and shouldn't turn me off the product but when 100 people, who may be anonymous, repeatedly say negative things about a product it is more likely it's true.
Even if you account for spam posts or comments or even competitor sabotage on the whole still 100 negative do carry more weight than one negative review and by the way that's not exclusive to the web. Marketing ads on TV and other media regularly and by design tout a product over another while implicitly and explicitly discrediting the other.

mouser:
but when 100 people, who may be anonymous, repeatedly say negative things about a product it is more likely it's true.
--- End quote ---


Tons of research backs up the phenomena you are describing very strongly -- the more you hear something asserted, the more you are likely to believe it.

And i think something needs to be said about this, and this gets back to the reputation issue raised by others.

One of the reasons why companies and politicians pour money into making sure the same sound bites and assertions are fed into your ears over and over and over is to exploit the brain's tendency to believe something when it is repeated often enough.

I think one of the dangers of the increasing ubiquity of cloud/social networking sites and crown opinions, is the potential for companies to exploit this kind of thing in producing under-the-radar campaigns against competitors and to promote their own products.

Even absent these kinds of paid campaigns, there is a whole field of research on what DC member alex3f calls "information cascades" where you get a kind of arbitrary snowball effect of crowd opinions that can lead to some very misleading group preferences.

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