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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I guess it was a typo, as it now reads 29,919 with 22,919 stroked out.
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
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 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 "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.
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:)