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.

Comments

Re:Melodramatic

[morgan_greywolf]

Agreed. And moderation doesn't necessarily have to mean deleting posts. As a FidoNet echo moderator many years ago, 90% of what I had to do was to tell users to cool off or they were gonna get banned. Only nodes that were deliberately sending spam (or refused to listen to the moderator) got banned. It wasn't like we could really delete messages anyhow (there was no equivalent of UseNet's 'cancel'), but my moderation for local boards (where I did have the power to delete) was basically the same.

I only ever deleted a very small number of posts, most at the request of the original posters.

Re:Anecdotal Evidence Does not Warrant a Headline

[Kelbear]

A comparison of /two/ websites really didn't warrant a headline. All it takes to get a high post count is to make a forum without account registration or without captcha, then your polygraph testing forum will explode with tens of thousands of posts...advertising viagra.

There are way too many factors to make solid conclusions from a test sample of 2.

Re:But the quality of the posts

[Moebius Loop]

Traditionally, I've found that forums devoted to relatively specific interest groups tend to be mercifully free of gaping orifices.