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Explain to me the difference between "moderating" and "censoring"
- Thread starter glocke12
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How about some WHINE to go with that cheese gents?
There is no 1st Amendment right to have your opinions heard on this, or any other Board (unless it is being run by the Government....) Vote with your keyboards and find someplace else. Better yet, put up (and pay for) your own site, then YOU can be the nasty ole moderator and close the threads you disagree with.
Have an excellent day folks.
(and to the Mods...........thanks for the playground!)
There is no 1st Amendment right to have your opinions heard on this, or any other Board (unless it is being run by the Government....) Vote with your keyboards and find someplace else. Better yet, put up (and pay for) your own site, then YOU can be the nasty ole moderator and close the threads you disagree with.
Have an excellent day folks.
(and to the Mods...........thanks for the playground!)
I ain't no hollaback girl. This thread's got me feelin' hell-a good so it's gonna keep on dancin'.
I ain't no hollaback girl. This thread's got me feelin' hell-a good so it's gonna keep on dancin'.
ella ella ella ay ay ay ay under my umbrella...
I ain't no hollaback girl. This thread's got me feelin' hell-a good so it's gonna keep on dancin'.
If you say hell-a one more time, we're gonna have problems.
10-4 back door. Don't you kiddies have something better to do?
I say pull the plug on this bad boy
Since this thread is still open, I will take the opportunity to give another example of a possible imbalances in what subject matter moderators allow to remain posted. A new thread in PRSI titled "Geeze you think WE'RE hostile to Republicans" cites a CNN forum that has a long list of negative posts against Senator Jim Demint for his statement that Obama's policies are socialistic. The cited material consists merely of opinions denegrading republicans and cannot even remotely be considered fact-based. The point of the thread is apparently to show that people are reacting strongly against republicans and their criticisms of Obama's budget proposal and tax/spend priorities. I wonder whether the moderator would allow a similar thread to continue if the OP consisted only of subject matter posted in another (non-MR) forum ranting against democrats because they like Obama's budget and believe that he is not a socialist. My guess is that it would be toasted by the moderator within minutes of its origination.
I apologize if I have just violated MR rules by referring to a specific case or "naming names," but I thought that this was a good example for purposes of this discussion.
I apologize if I have just violated MR rules by referring to a specific case or "naming names," but I thought that this was a good example for purposes of this discussion.
Unless you do cite such a source, it will remain just that: a tendentious "guess". Besides, your phrase "the moderator" betrays a prejudiced expectation in itself: there is a team.
I can't answer for everyone else who is "the moderator," but I wouldn't close a thread purely because of that subject matter (and I would be curious if there have been any instances of doing such a thing). Actually, although the thread has not taken that turn, I thought that the post was interesting because the claims have previously been made that conservatives are always made to play the troll on MacRumors, that every political thread is full of nothing but liberals, and that this situation exists in part because moderators mistreat conservatives. This is a long chain of logical conclusions, and the OP of the other thread was responding to one of them -- the CNN talkback, which has very little moderation, is not MacRumors, barely even has the kind of forum collective culture that would be associated with MacRumors -- was much the same way. So they put forward a seemingly reasonable hypothesis that the sampling of anger towards the GOP on MacRumors is actually more as a result of widespread antipathy towards the GOP and not the result of selectivity (moderator or member) on MacRumors.
I personally thought it was also interesting, because many of the anti-GOP posters on that talkback were downright obnoxious. I probably would have deleted some of those posts had they been here (the gods hate all caps even more than Comic Sans).
There is this periodic accusation of, "If a conservative had," "If a Republican made a similar thread," "If I had been the one to," ..., "it would have been toasted / nuked / wastelanded / closed / deleted" or "I would have been banned."
There just isn't that much evidence that this is happening. I went back and looked at every PRSI thread that had been closed, locked, or wastelanded. The wastelanded ones are harder for me because I cannot see if they were indeed from the PRSI, so I had to scan titles and OP's for things and people that seemed like they might be.
I found 17 threads since 1 Jan 2009, about half of which were closed and half of which were in the Wasteland. Here's a review. Links provided for the ones that weren't deleted.
1) [link] -- This thread's topic was fine but there was no ensuing debate. It was closed after attempts were made to stop the bickering.
2) This was a dupe thread.
3) [link] This is the Obama vacation thread. We've talked about this one in some detail...
4) [link] I'm not sure that this originated in the PRSI, but it is also a dupe thread.
5) [link] This was a dupe thread also.
6) [link] I think this was closed because of bickering.
7) [link] This was related to that cat abuse case in the US... it was not only a repost but also it discussed a site that turned out to be fake and the situation had changed dramatically by the time it was posted so that it wasn't a good representation of the current situation.
8) [link] I'm pretty sure that this didn't come from the PRSI -- but it was PRSI material posted outside of the forum by an ineligible member, it was clearly faked by the member, and it immediately devolved into a FAIL fest.
9) [link] This was a poll asking which forum members had crashed a plane in the Hudson. I don't think we need to apologize for wastelanding it.
10) [link] I believe this was just posted in PRSI as bait to get people to check out an application that the poster wrote (and had nothing to do with the topic).
11) [link] Was political in nature and posted outside the PRSI but it was deleted for being spam. There is one more duplicate of this thread.
12) [link] This was deleted because a link was provided by itself with no excerpts or discussion. As far as I know, it wasn't reposted, but there's no reason it couldn't be. I'm sure there are other threads on advanced weapons development on PRSI.
13) [link] This was a PRSI thread in nature, but it was posted outside the PRSI and it was part of the 4Chan spamming, I think.
14) [link] This one is pretty much just like (12)
15) [link] This was PRSI in nature but it was part of a spam campaign (all posts schilling Youtube videos).
16) [link] I don't know what to say about this one -- it's really just grossly offensive.
The only one of them that really involved a thread being nuked immediately was #16. There were a few other threads here that were conservative or right-leaning in nature, but all of them were allowed to continue until they devolved into bickering, name calling, personal attacks, etc.
If that is what is happening, and conservative posters are feeling attacked by liberal posters, then we need you to be reporting those attacking posts instead of just letting the threads get closed and then complaining about them later....
i don't see how the thread in question and the cited CNN talkback address the questions of whether PRSI is full of liberals or whether moderators mistreat liberals. Just because anti-conservative talkback is prevalent in the CNN forum, that forum is not moderated, and the talkback is similar to what one finds in PRSI doesn't reflect at all on whether or not MR moderators are fair in their treatment of liberal- vs. conservative-leaning posts. The CNN talkback also shouldn't be taken as representative of widespread antipathy towards the GOP, since the CNN "sampling" (not being randomly selected) cannot be assumed to be representative of any larger population. If I can find some other forum where there is overwhelming expressions of anger against Obama and democrats, and I can assure you there are many out there, would you then apply your same logic and say that such talkback upholds the hypothesis that there is widespread antipathy toward Obama and democrats. You may have other good reasons for letting the MR thread in question remain posted, but the one you have given just doesn't cut it for me.
The mods aren't here to please you in your attempts to play the refs. I believe your warrantless and completely conjectural complaints based on guesses have received enough attention as it is.
True. And I, and I'm pretty sure others, appreciate that they have given us the opportunity in this thread to air our feelings and concerns about how they perform their role as moderators. They have been very patient and responsive, and have shared a lot of useful information that will help the MR community better understand the rules of posting. I can't say the same about the response you just posted. My last post is not warrantless, conjectural, and based on guesses as you claim. I correctly pointed out in my last post that the CNN backtalk cannot be assumed to be representative of the feelings of a larger community because it is not a representative sample. Most researchers would agree with that statement. I also said that I didn't think that the rationale mkrishnan gave in support of the MR thread in question is a good one. Has stating my opinion here gone too far?
Your obtuse carping is wearying and is not doing you any favours.
I'm closing this thread. You and the supposedly embattled and persecuted minority have had your fifteen minutes of fame and your complaints have been addressed indepth and at length by a number of mods, including the site's owner.
Please take this up using the contact us form if you would like to press things further.
Cheers.
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