"Welcome back,"
Thanks, but it was a struggle for me to even post that review. After my "you are expelled for 7 days" fatwah from SI, led by agents of the Maniban and the Jerryhad, I had no inclination to return to cast perl before swine.
I've been on the Net actively since 1988, not counting brief contact when I worked at Intel and even back to a cheesy account on the original ARPANet in 1973. I've seen dozens of experiments with "moderation" and they are pretty much nearly all the same sort of thing: a clique of alleged "moderators" or just a single ayotallah chooses what is OK and what is not OK. And, predictably, others test the limits to see how close they can get to being expelled or censored. (I use "censorship" in the general definition, so, please, no lectures on the First Amendment and how only government can truly censor.)
Some examples:
Example: the head of the Maniban, a guy named Mani Ahmadi, announced that discussions of the 911 events were "off-topic" and had gone on long enough and that further discussions could result in a ban. Most complied. But Mani did not: some time after his announcement, he himself wrote an impassioned critique of Israel. This is the "Moderated AMD" thread he is the ayotollah of. I almost wrote a denunciation of this foaming at the mouth attack on Israel, but when I went back to find the post, I couldn't. (Both Paul Engel and I remember this long pro-Iran, anti-Israel post...we tried to find it, but couldn't. Perhaps we missed it, or perhaps Mani removed it. No "cancelled" message, just "gone." I haven't spent the hours it might take to try to reconstruct whether there's a gap in the numbering or whether Mani is SI could remove a post and then have all the reference numbers renumber correctly...)
Example: the wide use of "f*sk" and "sh*t" to get around the SI auto-detect routines. Nobody is fooled by this, and it shows the infantile system of merely screening for "the seven dirty words." While some words no doubt offend some people, there is a time and a place for good, strong, Anglo-Saxon expletives. This is not a children's forum, this is not the radio, so FCC rules about "seven dirty words" hardly apply. (Nor does the FCC seem to care, as the lyrics of "gangsta rap" frequently use these words...heck (see!), even the televised charity concert in NYC had the Who singing "Who the f*ck are _you_?" to wild cheers from the cops and firefighters.)
Gosh darn it, we are not f*cking children.
Example: "I'm going to _tell_!" One of the sad effects of a climate of censorship and this kind of banal moderation is the rise in the number of "tattle-tales." Often these are the very same people baiting others and using the "fsck you!" euphemisms. Instead of either ignoring those they don't wish to read, they engage in endless rounds of "You have gone too far!" and "I am reporting this violation of netiquette to SI!" and "See you in a week!" idiocy. Censorship frequently results in a feeding frenzy of meta-debate about what the censors should do, how the rules were applied unevenly, etc.
Example, from another forum: Often the moderator/censor finds himself trapped in a strange situation. He blocks a post, then finds he has to block the _comments_ about his blocking. (This happened when some clown announced he was going to "moderate" a discussion list. Regrettably, the owner of the machine the list was carried on allowed him to. So this yokel suppresses a message that was critical of his _employer_, later claiming he did it because he feared legal exposure, blah blah. But since some of us gotten out-of-band copies of the message (cc: copies, like SI's PMs), and had then replied to the banned message, this yokel decided to censor _our_ messages. Even ones which had absolutely zero obscene or off-topic content! The censor's work is never done.
All in all, I have never seen a list or forum improved by having busy-bodies running around talking about what is "appropriate" and what is not. People in a forum will want to talk about what is important to them. And they will do at the "water cooler" or "break room" that is most familiar and comfortable to them. The fact that the Intel forum on SI routinely wanders off into baseball discussions, Scumbria's views on traffic jams, the 911 events on all sides, and so on for a dozen or more non-Intel topics is not surprising. Why? Because the various fora on SI are, like Usenet newsgroups and Yahoo chat rooms, primarily "watering holes" for a group of friends and not-so-friends. If they want to comment on the 911 events, they'll do it on the forum they usually hang out in, not in the "most appropriate" group, where they have no idea who they are talking to.
(The use of bizarre screen names makes it harder to enter other groups, in my view. It took me months of dipping into the Intel forum before gettting used to names like "wannabmw" and "brushwud" and so on. Whenever I visit an ostensibly more on-topic group, e.g., visiting the Rambus group to comment on a Rambus news item, I am blitzed by completely bizarre names and I have no particular interest or patience to learn who "electricman" or "faze237" are. I'd rather post my Rambus comment to the Intel forum, where at least I have met some of the people in person, even worked with them years ago. This is one reason I tend to repond more to folks with real names, like Paul Engel, Amy J., Mary Cluney, Dave Budde, etc.)
So, this is why I didn't return when my one week expulsion was over. What the f*sk is the point?
See ya later, if my "f*ck" does not result in another dad-blamed, gosh-darned expulsion.
--Tim May |
