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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
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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.
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 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:)