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.
? 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.
Censored? Do we mean, less melodramatically, "moderated"?
Perhaps the author is under the impression that quantity and quality are the same thing.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
I must say it, with a sample size of two, the statistical evidence is surely convincing...
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Now they can moderate me (-1 Troll) and prove you wrong.
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.
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.
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.
Also, a site used by professionals simply won't have the huge volume of unfounded and tinfoil-hat opinion that you see in open-discussion forums, *regardless* of the subject and *regardless* of whether either is pro-whatever or con-whatever. It's that way everywhere. And if a professional forum is opened to every wild-assed opinion that flames by, it soon becomes useless to those professionals for whom time is money.
So... while I am against censorship in principle (and absolutely against it when it is *government mandated*), this doesn't mean that a privately-owned site should be forced to allow every post that comes down the pipe. It merely needs to be consistent.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?