Worse than censorship

Piegasm's new trick, which he used first on me and has now used on Setar too, is a prime example of the awful moderation culture over there.

http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=716&start=625

Piegasm:

Mod note:

Setar, come on. Realpology sans explanations of why it's too much to ask of you right now or stop posting in this thread. You've been issued an official warning. Any further posts in this thread which consist of anything other than an apology will result in a 1 day temp ban.

Setar

I'm sorry. What I said was racist and I will not say such things again.

It's exceedingly hard to work up much sympathy for Setar considering the endless abuse (s)he has doled out to others.

But, I am not sure that "Shyamalamadingdong" is racist. It is merely a play on the 50's rock-n-roll "ramalamadingdong"

What a bunch of delicate doilies!

But, I agree that Piegasm's moderation is anything but moderate.

scott1328 wrote:It's exceedingly hard to work up much sympathy for Setar considering the endless abuse (s)he has doled out to others.

But, I am not sure that "Shyamalamadingdong" is racist. It is merely a play on the 50's rock-n-roll "ramalamadingdong"

What a bunch of delicate doilies!

But, I agree that Piegasm's moderation is anything but moderate.

I disagree with you there. Shyamalamadingdong is racist in my view, and I can completely see how it could cause upset. On the other hand, I don't think twisting people's arms into apologising is any way to solve that.

Zampano wrote:On the other hand, I don't think twisting people's arms into apologising is any way to solve that.

I am not sure what the point is in forcing an apology; they are by their very nature insincere.

As for the racism though, YMMV

What's wrong about this is it's a false dichotomy. Apparently saying "Shyamalamadingdong" either is racist (a heinous crime) or it's completely OK.

The fact is that if you are using this word to refer to M. Night Shayamalan then it does relate to the "funny people with funny names" meme which has a cultural arrogance about it, so it does mark the user out to be something of a 'dick'. I wouldn't say it's 'racist', though.

It's the sort of thing that should be left to anyone who is actually offended to reply to, rather than a matter for the Committee Of Public Safety to get all righteously indignant about on behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world.

scott1328 wrote:It's exceedingly hard to work up much sympathy for Setar considering the endless abuse (s)he has doled out to others.

But, I am not sure that "Shyamalamadingdong" is racist. It is merely a play on the 50's rock-n-roll "ramalamadingdong"

What a bunch of delicate doilies!

I wouldn't object to strict enforcement of language that could be construed as racist. What's striking about the above is how delicately the regular members are treated. They get coaxed into changing their minds.

But, I agree that Piegasm's moderation is anything but moderate.

I like the threat to ban someone for talking about the moderators on the moderator discussion thread. Using moderator bold.

Whatever happens to that forum, I can't see Piegasm lasting as a moderator. It's going to blow up sooner or later, because you can't continually treat people in that way without sooner or later hitting the wall. There'll be an incident like the above, and people will line up on opposite sides.

I note that Linus points out an example of moderator inaccuracy in the same thread. Naturally this is considered ban-worthy behaviour, and he gets a warning. When a moderator tells a lie, it's a test of loyalty to accept it. Just stop talking about it!

Lying about the reasons why people are banned is part of the essential nature of A+safe. Looking down the list of banned names, I know that many of the reasons given for banning are deeply dishonest. Thought Criminal posts (somewhere else) that he's engaging seriously and not trolling. Piegasm gives him a ban for saying the exact opposite. Of course, as well as being capricious and volatile, Piegasm tends not to read the posts which elicit bans very thoroughly.

Hi, I'm the Thought Criminal you're talking about. Yes, they did pile one me, which I could handle, and then blocked me for handling it.

To be fair, Atheism+ is an extreme example of a common thing, which is forum censorship. My policy is to simply leave and never return.

Thought Criminal wrote:Hi, I'm the Thought Criminal you're talking about. Yes, they did pile one me, which I could handle, and then blocked me for handling it.

To be fair, Atheism+ is an extreme example of a common thing, which is forum censorship. My policy is to simply leave and never return.

A very fair response. Totally agree with you - the forum seems to be pretty much like most other forums I've experienced. Cliques build up quickly. Forums seem to breed that.

nullnvoid wrote:

Thought Criminal wrote:Hi, I'm the Thought Criminal you're talking about. Yes, they did pile one me, which I could handle, and then blocked me for handling it.

To be fair, Atheism+ is an extreme example of a common thing, which is forum censorship. My policy is to simply leave and never return.

A very fair response. Totally agree with you - the forum seems to be pretty much like most other forums I've experienced. Cliques build up quickly. Forums seem to breed that.

To be frank, I've yet to find a suitable forum. On the one hand, there are insane dictatorships, such as Atheism+, and then there are utterly chaotic noise bins, such as TalkRational. Both make intelligent conversation impossible. Some are more balanced, such as FreeRatio, but even they sink to censorship at the drop of a hat.

Thought Criminal wrote:
To be frank, I've yet to find a suitable forum. On the one hand, there are insane dictatorships, such as Atheism+, and then there are utterly chaotic noise bins, such as TalkRational. Both make intelligent conversation impossible. Some are more balanced, such as FreeRatio, but even they sink to censorship at the drop of a hat.

I admit a strong preference for Reddit. Although a close second would be stack exchange: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com & hopefully soon: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37472/atheism-agnosticism.

Making the order of discussions by vote makes topics much easier for review.

nullnvoid wrote:

Thought Criminal wrote:
To be frank, I've yet to find a suitable forum. On the one hand, there are insane dictatorships, such as Atheism+, and then there are utterly chaotic noise bins, such as TalkRational. Both make intelligent conversation impossible. Some are more balanced, such as FreeRatio, but even they sink to censorship at the drop of a hat.

I admit a strong preference for Reddit. Although a close second would be stack exchange: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com & hopefully soon: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37472/atheism-agnosticism.

Making the order of discussions by vote makes topics much easier for review.

Interesting. Perhaps crowd-sourcing moderation via voting leads to better results than trusting a few admins to keep the peace.

That reminds me that I once did a search for forum software that implements voting on threads and posts, with low-rated ones getting hidden. I couldn't find any freeware software packages that were in a ready-to-go state. Slashdot's software is available, but it did not seem to be in a ready-to-go state, at least judging from how long someone expected it to take to get it running.

What I mean by a ready-to-go state is something like phpBB or Simple Machines or vBulletin, which are relatively easy to install and start. I remember once installing and running phpBB and Simple Machines on my home computer.