Anonymous wrote:
No, he's got it right. The announcement of the moderation experiment was followed by a decline in interesting threads.
This is actually inevitable. When people feel controlled, they do not come up with as many interesting ideas. This is a cost of moderation. Whether it does or does not outweigh the benefits (like some people not being fired) is a good question. Some other fora, such as alt.pagan, were so drowned in trolls that they simply could not conduct any meaningful discussions. For them, the benefit of moderation was creation of a place to talk. What is important for freedom of speech is not the presence of "closed" places like moderated cypherpunks, but the presence of "open" places like cypherpunks-unedited. I'd probably subscribe to it, as long as its level of noise is tolerable. The interesting thing that moderators will soon discover is that competition between the moderated and the unedited list would lead to so substantial improvement of the unedited list, that lots of people will not feel a need for any moderation and will unsubscribe from the moderated list and subscribe to the unmoderated one. Sandy & Co should not view it as their failure, but rather as their success. What they want, hopefully, is not to be control freaks, but to make readers better off. (and no one gets any worse off against their will) - Igor.