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The Effects of Censorship — a Tale of Two Websites
An anonymous reader writes "Two message boards devoted to the same topic have each been on-line for roughly eight years. One is censored, and the other is not. The two forums are virtually the only ones devoted to their topic (polygraph testing, a fairly arcane one), so they're in "competition" only with each other. The result? The uncensored forum has more than six times as many posts as the censored one." To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.
cmdrtaco smells bad.
? What about s/n ratio on censored and uncensored forums ? if 5 of 6 posts on latter messageboard are offtopic (goatse, flamewars, irrelevant and trollish) , then s/n ratio of censored forum is waay higher.
Does the censored one get "FRIST P0ST!!!" posts?
Also, FRIST P0ST!!!
Censored? Do we mean, less melodramatically, "moderated"?
Perhaps the author is under the impression that quantity and quality are the same thing.
* post censored *
I shouldn't have to say this. The article doesn't talk at all about the quality of the posting in the forums, only that in one, dissenting opinions are banned (and, being said by the competition, I take it with a boatload of salt).
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Oh wait, that's Slashdot.
Show me a topic with 10 or 12 forums, with a balance between censored and uncensored formats, and *then* I'll grant the possibility of a trend.
Otherwise, one bad moderator, or one good poster can make a big difference, hiding the effects of censorship.
and the website is already slashdotted so you can't blame me for not having RTFA (RTFF?).
Anyway, what's the point of just counting the number of posts?
More posts != better posts.
Wow. One website has a green background, and another has a blue background. The one with the green background has 12x as many posts as the other one. Coincidence? I think not.
The "uncensored" board has two sections which do not exist on the other board: "off topic", which has the usual "forum games" and other post-count spammers, and a section called "Employment Forums", which also deals with off-topic posting.
It's easy to claim you have more posts than your competitor if your scope is much wider.
Maybe a polygraph will tell us if this is a first post...
Measuring your success by the number of posts, either as an individual or as a forum owner is irrelevant - unless you're counting on advertisement revenue.
If I was interested in this topic, I'd be inclined to post to whichever one had the more professional (i.e. lowest spam ratio) content
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
One search engine has been online for roughly 10 years, the other for about 13. Both devoted to search the web. One is Google and rules the world, the other is Altavista and almost disappeared. Conclusion? There are a lot of factors that influence success; this article is useless.
The problems are obvious and numerous.
First of all, there is the assumption that the only difference between the two boards is that one is moderated (censored? give me a break) and the other is not. There is no accounting for differences in advertising, domain names, partnerships, ease of use and navigation, bad moderators, abusive members, on-page advertising, site speed, yadda yadda.
Second of all, there is a difference between quantity and quality. Many Usenet groups still get many more posts than online forums covering the same topics, but 90%+ of Usenet posts are just garbage.
To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.
I'll say.
My first suspicion was that one just reeked of horrid angry fruit salad 1999 intarwebs design (dancing Jesu & flying toasters with a midi track in octaves meant for torture timed with a blinking marquee tag). Honestly, they look about on par although I prefer the simplicity of YaBB though in my opinion it doesn't seem to be an issue here. Normally this is the biggest discriminator for a website's success, not the content.
I did find it interesting to note the slant to these message boards though. The 'uncensored' website has this text as it's homepage:
Did you know:
While the 'censored' board has this as its opening text:
The Polygraph Place
My work here is dung.
I wonder what their research proposal looked like.
I bet it goes something like this:
research hypothesis: censorship leads to conversations (c) being censored
H1: c1 > c2
Null-hypothesis: censorhsip has no consequences whatsoever
H0: c1 = c2
Money needed for research: $12 million + travel expenses
The two forums are virtually the only ones devoted to their topic (polygraph testing, a fairly arcane one), so they're in "competition" only with each other.
It seems to me that any one of a number of factors could cause one to be far more popular than the other, even if the forums were identical. For instance, a lot of forums have "supermembers" that bring a lot more value to the forums than most people do. If one of these people made their way to one forum rather than the other, people subsequently finding both forums would choose to participate in that particular one. Those people, in turn, would attract more people.
When you only look at two samples, the conclusions you can draw are sketchy at best. Also, size isn't the determining factor when it comes to judging quality. See 4chan for more information on that topic.
I've been a user of a forum about running for a long time (runnersworld.com). Suddenly they changed the software, and responses to a topic where suddenly sequential and not threaded (tabbed), which caused a vast majority to emigrate to another board that had a much better overview of the posts, and who replied to who. Maybe censorship is not the only pointer.
Why polygraph is bad.
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Polygraph for therapy.
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If your forum deals with a POPULAR topic. Boards about obscure topics don't need as much (or any) moderation cause spammers don't visit them, and annoying immature trolls, don't know such things exist let alone there are msg boards about them.
Try having an unmoderated Microsoft board.
Mind you, the only two forums i am regular at are unmodarated. Granted they are quite uninformative, and there is certain kind of community policing.
But moderation is required, however as slashdot has proven a moderation mainly based on rewarding then punishing works much better.
I think slashdot is best example of moderation, if you think mods are unfair you can alway surf at -1 and see all the posts.
This is NOT a payed advertisement.
Also posts that WILL TOTALLY GET MODDED DOWN for TELLIN' THEM SLASHDOT SHEEPLE LIKE IT IS, MAN!
Never mind the party line, the surest way to a +5 here is the Path Of The Wannabe Martyr.
number of posts != quality of content.
Sure, the "article" may be a crappy posting by some guy in antipolygraph.org, but he's right. Moderators don't filter very well.
To see a good example, moderate me +1 Insightful.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
This is an article on a website claiming that it is better than its (only) competitor. There is no attempt at analysis, no evidence presented other than anecdotal, and the author's bias is clear:
The board also has a private forum that is open to polygraph examiners only. It has some 7,789 posts. They must have a lot to talk about that they don't want the public to know.
Or maybe it's all stuff that simply wouldn't interest the public, like arranging social engagements or talking about last night's game. Point is you don't know, so the implication that it's something they need to hide is disingenuous.
Shame on you CmdrTaco for posting this, and shame on all of us (including me) for taking the time to reply.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
22,919 is not 6.5 times 4,579 or anywhere near 30,000. And if you include the private posts on the other forum, it's down to less than twice as many posts.
"I earn nearly half-a-million a year", said the man earning £100K!
They are 2 websites! Different traffic, different stats: ===== Antipolygraph.org: Google PageRank: 5 DETAILS Alexa Rank: N/A Compete Rank: 95,912 DETAILS Quantcast Rank: 81,376 DETAILS Google BackLinks: 101 DETAILS Yahoo BackLinks: 6,704 DETAILS Live Search BackLinks: 5 DETAILS Technorati Links: 193 DETAILS ==== www.polygraphplace.com: Google PageRank: 5 DETAILS Alexa Rank: N/A Compete Rank: 339,102 DETAILS Quantcast Rank: 304,754 DETAILS Google BackLinks: 42 DETAILS Yahoo BackLinks: N/A DETAILS Live Search BackLinks: 0 DETAILS Technorati Links: 1 DETAILS NOW LOOK AT THE DATA AND WHICH SOULD HAVE MORE TRAFFIC AND MORE COMMENTS? What kind of apples to apples comparison is this? Because they have the same subject and age only? Rubisssssshhhhhh...
Signal to noise right?
To see a prime example, take a look at Saturday's Slashdot post Wikimedia Censors Wikinews. The latter half of the article text, written by an anonymous author, was just wrong, a fact that one commenter noticed after discussion was well underway.
The text, in case you're curious:
(Actually, section 230 exempts you whether or not you exercise editorial control. In fact, that law was passed in large part to clarify unclear prior laws and to make it clear that even if you exercised editorial control, you were still protected. See Stratton Oakmont Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 229 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1995).)
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
we're dealing with polygraph aficionados? people who's obsessive hobby or profession is in the detection of lies... ok
you would think that such a crowd wouldn't need censors, in fact, wouldn't WANT censors. if lie detection was my thing, i'd want a comment board littered with lies. you know, to work at my skillset. i could bond with other posters on the commment board as we sniffed out who was lying and who wasn't
"did you see the obvious freudian slip in that post, and the so-called 'accidental' dropping the pronoun at the end of the second sentence? his subconcious is practically screaming guilt"
"as good as beads of sweat on that post. and you can almost hear the hesitant stammering in the final sentence, the way he loops around his final point"
"yeah, that post is a lie"
it seems to me that aficionados of polygraph testing who need censorship is kind of like psychics who can't guess the lottery numbers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
All moderation really does is change the type of abuse.
I must say it, with a sample size of two, the statistical evidence is surely convincing...
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Polygraph testing is just divination with a technological slant. Instead of looking at chicken bones or tea leaves and trying to interpret them, you look at how someone's skin resistance changes. It's just as bogus as phrenology.
By the same token, comparing numbers of posts on two boards doesn't really say much about how good they are.
Now they can moderate me (-1 Troll) and prove you wrong.
I'm not normally a negative individual but, OMG! Little wonder it came from an AC; I sure wouldn't want my name associated with such a blatant attempt to build FUD over censorship. Others have already addressed the utter lack of statistical significance of the suspect sample group.
If anything, this article made me more tolerant of censorship, particularly if it prevents baseless FUD like this article.
Invenio via vel creo
I bet it has 6 times as many "Buy \ /|A.G.R.A" posts as well.
I would like to point out that unless the government is moderating the forum, then it is not censorship. It is simply a private entity moderating the site which he owns. Good for him.
more "first post!" posts in the "uncensored" forum.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
goatse, goatse!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
One from last year here about George Maschke critiquing a polygraph test that was admitted as court evidence without the agreement of both parties.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Authorities exist in both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Just because one is not backed by a government does not mean one is incapable of censorship, though as a censor, one might prefer a more PC term like "editorial controller".
It's one thing getting up on your high horse and saying "Censorship is wrong" is one thing, but ascribing it negative effects is simply doesn't have is just damaging your own cause. The websites listed are on different damn subjects, one discusses the merits of polygraphs, one helps people search for people trained in using them. So one's a discussion forum, one's an information source, not the same thing at all. The simple fact is if censorship had such measurable negative effects then it would be well known and it wouldn't happen any where near as much.
However I think there's a greater problem, how the heck do you quantize censorship, is it deleting spam? Deleting posts who disagree with you? Shouting down anyone who disagrees with you? Banning opposing views? Moderating posts so only the consensus of the moderators is shown to the general users?
I can say that this "article" is quite off base. I own a fairly busy political debate forum. We're a moderated forum by choice. We have a clear set of rules in place aimed specifically at maintaining quality and discouraging quantity, regardless of whatever opinion someone may present, and we have a group of moderators who cover the entire political spectrum. We've been around less than six years (compared to the 8-9 years in the article), and we sit at just short of a quarter million posts. Who cares? Post count only matters for those who believe quantity is more important than quantity. I see all these forums that are proud of their massive volume of content, yet it is clear they haven't placed nearly as much emphasis on ensuring that their sites offer anything resembling quality. The "censorship" claims are a load of bushwa. Censorship is silencing at the hand of government. On a privately owned and funded website, there is no such thing as censorship. A person has just as much right to espouse the positive aspects of polygraph testing at an anti-polygraph website as a person who stands at the front door of a Ford dealership and tells everyone walking in that Chevy offers a superior product. And a member at any forum has the right to find a different forum to post their dribble. What he have here is a moderator at a website-- one who as an individual has over 15% of the total post count of the "uncensored" forum and who single-handedly is only 300 posts short of the total post count at the opposing forum-- trying to make his site of choice look good with the forum-equivalent of a press release. And as we all know, you can't post it on the internet if it's not true. My site has been on the opposing side of this type of situation. We've been accused of everything: They're too strict. They're biased. They censor. They ban people for disagreeing. They take the fun out of political debate. I've heard it all. I've been at it long enough to know that my site-- much like these two polygraph sites with radically opposing positions-- is not a perfect fit for everyone. Some people like moderated forums, some like the unmoderated forums. If someone leaves our site for another site because the other site is a better fit, so be it. It doesn't mean we're in competition with the other site. It simply means that one particular person is more comfortable at a different site. But I like quality. I would rather have 10 members with 10 good posts apiece than 1,000 members with 1,000 posts apiece that consist of nothing buy smilies. But wow would a post count of 1,000,000 sure look better than 100. Looks, of course, can be deceiving. BTW, I've been lurking at Slashdot for years and this is the first headline that got me to comment. Please be nice. Mike
It's interesting to see, again, how some seem to think that proactive moderation of a privately owned discussion venue is censorship. In the "censored" site, I'm sure there are many banned members crying that their vulgarity-laced and off-topic posts are being deleted and their accounts terminated. Wha wha wha. The reality is that intelligent people prefer a civil environment in which to discuss interesting topics. Children prefer a chaotic environment where they can spew about drugs and use naughty words with reckless abandon. But when interesting topics are discussed by knowledgeable people with normal social graces, which do you think will have the more valuable discussions, and hence, more actual traffic? (posts do not equal traffic) DISCLAIMER: I run one such very-large venue that gets 4,000+ posts a day, 1.2 million monthly visitors ---- and no one is allowed to insult, swear, or discuss inappropriate topics... huh, decorum works.
Sorry, I figured Slashdot automatically converted linebreaks...
I can say that this "article" is quite off base. I own a fairly busy political debate forum. We're a moderated forum by choice. We have a clear set of rules in place aimed specifically at maintaining quality and discouraging quantity, regardless of whatever opinion someone may present, and we have a group of moderators who cover the entire political spectrum.
We've been around less than six years (compared to the 8-9 years in the article), and we sit at just short of a quarter million posts. Who cares? Post count only matters for those who believe quantity is more important than quantity. I see all these forums that are proud of their massive volume of content, yet it is clear they haven't placed nearly as much emphasis on ensuring that their sites offer anything resembling quality.
The "censorship" claims are a load of bushwa. Censorship is silencing at the hand of government. On a privately owned and funded website, there is no such thing as censorship. A person has just as much right to espouse the positive aspects of polygraph testing at an anti-polygraph website as a person who stands at the front door of a Ford dealership and tells everyone walking in that Chevy offers a superior product. And a member at any forum has the right to find a different forum to post their dribble.
What he have here is a moderator at a website-- one who as an individual has over 15% of the total post count of the "uncensored" forum and who single-handedly is only 300 posts short of the total post count at the opposing forum-- trying to make his site of choice look good with the forum-equivalent of a press release. And as we all know, you can't post it on the internet if it's not true.
My site has been on the opposing side of this type of situation. We've been accused of everything: They're too strict. They're biased. They censor. They ban people for disagreeing. They take the fun out of political debate.
I've heard it all. I've been at it long enough to know that my site-- much like these two polygraph sites with radically opposing positions-- is not a perfect fit for everyone. Some people like moderated forums, some like the unmoderated forums. If someone leaves our site for another site because the other site is a better fit, so be it. It doesn't mean we're in competition with the other site. It simply means that one particular person is more comfortable at a different site.
But I like quality. I would rather have 10 members with 10 good posts apiece than 1,000 members with 1,000 posts apiece that consist of nothing buy smilies. But wow would a post count of 1,000,000 sure look better than 100. Looks, of course, can be deceiving.
BTW, I've been lurking at Slashdot for years and this is the first headline that got me to comment. Please be nice.
Mike
I can't reply to his post to criticise his creative statistics and woolly definition of "censorship"!
can also be observed in another rather limited case. In the arena of Person-to-Person (P2P) lending on the Internet, the first-mover company Prosper.com had so much trouble with its first set of forums, that it deleted them (a copy is available at ProsperReport). "Uncensored forums then sprang into existence at prospers.org. The tone of the Prosper forum, which is moderated and where each post is subject to review before it is allowed to pass is dramatically different from the tone of prospers.org, where a number of the vocal critics of Prosper continues to point out flaws in the operation of P2P lending and in the company itself.
I guess the difference is not as much due to being "censored" (i.e. moderated) or not. One site is for professionals in the field, the other is for activists who fear that technology for some reason.
Anyone could create the exact opposite effect if they wished to: create an unmoderated forum on, let's say, chrome plating technology. Then create a moderated forum debating the supposed ill-effects of chromium on human health. Want to bet that the "censored" anti-chromium site would get six times as many posts as the technical one?
Seems to have closed one of it's more popular message boards for the Today Programme. I just came across a mention of that in The Register.
Hmm, I messed up the HTML. Here is a link to the article in The Register.
The "article" is nothing more than a message board post on one of the sites in question, by one of the site's administrators, loudly proclaiming how much better they are than the other site because they don't "censor" people. Oh, and it was submitted by an AC.
Call me cynical, but I'm not seeing the news here, just a sly attempt at advertising.
We should also conclude that the forum with adjusting width is 6.5 times more popular than the forum with fixed with for 800x600px, blue is better than grey, and navigation on top is better than on the right side. ...and maybe, but just maybe, that there are more people against polyographs than pro, but that is probably pure coincidence
The line between censorship and moderation is thick and blurred, if indeed there really is one. I struggle to think of something which could be described by one word, but not the other. I suspect that the true distinction lies in the opinions of those who use the words, and the reactions they wish to incite through that use.
Can you really get any scientific conclusions from analyzing websites devoted to what is essentially electronic astrology?
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
errrm. since .. you know ... that time i registered on this site.
Read radical news here
There may be a gray area between trolling/flaming and disagreeing, but if posters are really "courteous, on-topic" banning them is clearly censorship and not moderation.
You didn't make a point. You only reported data.
Sounds more like "flamebait" to me, Trollie-O!
OH SNAP, that teh funny! Mod me +1 funny pl0x, kthx.
A quick check of Google Groups shows that soc.history (my favorite USENET group back in 1994) has 42477 topics, while soc.history.moderated has only 7482, around one-sixth as many topics. But I would never pick soc.history over soc.history.moderated. The quality of posts in the latter is much better. Indeed, I had to abandon soc.history entirely around 1995 or so due to the flooding of the group by "Serdar Argic" (a semi-automated genocide-denier that argued that the rest of the world had it all wrong and that the starving Armenians had massacred the poor defenseless Ottoman Turks during World War I). The number of posts is far less important than the content of those posts, and some forms of censorship (restrained moderation) end up producing a much more interesting and intelligent discussion than a free-for-all.
Make cheese not war 8:)
Does the attendance truly correlate to the level of censorship?
Also, what is the purpose of this post? To show that more people like uncensored forums? Why is that news?
Overnight, hundreds of polygraph based forums spring up over the internet, completely skewing this data set.
This is too easy.
Slashdot Groupthink says there is no Groupthink.
Claim that there is and you are modded to -1.
There IS NO censorship here!
Now be SILENT!
What's important is the content of the post and it's usefulness to the topic/community. Uncensored communites tend to have a lot of spam and other crap.
the problem is, its too much for one person to read.
stop it.
Counting posts is certainly a very poor method of making comparisions. Some of the things that can be used to quantitatively evaluate the quality of discussion are the ratio of active users to lurkers, the distribution of numbers of posts to individuals, the length of the posts, and the topology of the discussion threads. For instance, thread depth and breadth ( how narrow or bushy the tree is ), the decay time of threads, are most people responding to posts of a few individuals, or do folks pair up ad hoc on discussions. All the above can also incorporate the time element, i.e. do folks respond in minutes or over weeks. If you are are really an over achiever, you can also use NLP to evaluate the phrases in the posts for emotional commitment. These are just a few of the comparitive methods I've scene researchers use. Post count itself is meaningless.
You may also want to look at what type of Censorship. For example unmoderated forums normally have much lower usage than well moderated ones.
Jesus, I'd forgotten about him. Know any good recipes for Turkey?
... but the point may still be valid. Indeed. If only we knew what the point was. Of course I know what the poster is trying to say here: "Censorship is soooo bad for you". And there are indeed many examples in the world that illustrate that point, but this posting reeks to high heaven of dishonesty, in my opinion.First of all - we hear about two message boards, "one is censored, one isn't"; what does that mean? My guess is that it means one is moderated, so why not just say that? It is after all the normal, accepted word; the answer, I assume, is that "censored" sounds more dramatic, more fit to purpose. We all hate censorship, but most can see the sense in moderating a discussion.
And there is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words": "... but the point may still be valid". This is like saying "For all we know, George W Bush may be a pedophile" - which is technically true, since we don't know a thing about his sexual preferences; it is also a hugely dishonest thing to say, since it suggests something which there is no reason to suspect.
We should all fight against spin - if we stand for the truth, for something that is good, we have no use for dishonesty.