Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Better yet, the article is in the anti polygraph, and they are those that argue to have more posts. Is there an "objective" document somewhere, rather than complains of "And yeah.. they even removed our posts!".
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?
The line between censorship and moderation is thick and blurred, if indeed there really is one.
It's pretty clear on slashdot. Moderation = no comment is ever deleted or altered; comments become more or less visible due to moderation but anyone can easily view every single comment exactly as it was entered. Censorship = entire comments or parts of comments completely disappear or change and the originals are permanantly removed.
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:)