censorship on dissensus: the disappearance of the confessions thread

Yeah, the thing is, I understand not wanting the board to be overrun by sex and drugs talk. I do think some threads have been unnecessarily derailed by sex and drug stories. But many have been derailed by other inanity as well.

I just think it's really really unfeeling and strange to act like it's wrong (or "psychotic" or however Stelfox put it) for people to bring up struggles with mental illness. Talk about reinforcing social stigma. There have been plenty of really cogent discussions of mental illness and the pharmaceutical industry in the West etc. etc. that I found really interesting.

Mr. Tea said:

I'm not sure I get you: American society as a whole is generally more censorious than British society, I'd have said, be it from a right-wing prospective ('family values', concern over 'blasphemy') or a left-wing one (political correctness). Of course that doesn't mean all Americans think that way, but it you're generalising about a whole country, I'd say you've got it the wrong way round...

Click to expand...

I don't know, I've noticed similar splits in the past on Dissensus. I think the cultural difference has less to do with "free speech" issues and more to do with the fact that there's a very fundamental difference in the way British and American people approach casual social interactions. I think Americans are far less uptight, by which I mean I think (from what I've observed, I know this isn't scientific or particularly sociologically accurate or anything) they have far fewer unspoken or unwritten restrictions regarding what constitutes acceptable discussion topics between strangers or acquaintances. Also, in America, most people will always err on the side of "in my experience" when discussing something controversial or heated rather than pretending there's some sort of objective high horse one can perch on when it comes to matters of opinion.

nomadologist said:

in America, most people will always err on the side of "in my experience" when discussing something controversial or heated rather than pretending there's some sort of objective high horse one can perch on when it comes to matters of opinion.

Click to expand...

except for me (but then again i'm really Chinese not American)

zhao said:

except for me (but then again i'm really Chinese not American)

Click to expand...

you seem American enough to me! hehe.

i think there may be a small element of "free speech" idealism on my part--i just don't think the internet is the best place to go around getting upset about what others say or do. it's just not worth it. there are tons of posts on here i haven't liked, but i tend to respond to them and question them and try to start a dialogue rather than ask for them to be banned.

nomadologist said:

I don't know, I've noticed similar splits in the past on Dissensus. I think the cultural difference has less to do with "free speech" issues and more to do with the fact that there's a very fundamental difference in the way British and American people approach casual social interactions. I think Americans are far less uptight, by which I mean I think (from what I've observed, I know this isn't scientific or particularly sociologically accurate or anything) they have far fewer unspoken or unwritten restrictions regarding what constitutes acceptable discussion topics between strangers or acquaintances. Also, in America, most people will always err on the side of "in my experience" when discussing something controversial or heated rather than pretending there's some sort of objective high horse one can perch on when it comes to matters of opinion.

Click to expand...

My impression is that Americans are censorious and simultaneously hold a deep love of the concept of freedom of speech. That's "censorious" if you understand censorship in the broadest sense, not in the literal sense of government suppression of speech. I think it's generally an American trait to hate hate HATE explicit rules about what you can and can't say (religious fundies aside, I guess ), but to condone an awful lot of silencing done through private or social means.

On another note, I really don't get talking about speech online as if the internet is one place ("i can just go elsewhere"), or even if Dissensus is a huge place. If it is huge, then deleting a thread on Dissensus (one tiny part of the internet) surely isn't censorship, since you have the rest of the internet (or Dissensus) to get your racist ramblings or personal attacks or whatnot from.

If the internet is not one single site for speech, but instead a lot of clusters and networks that are privately supported and organized, then having mods who define the social rules of engagement is sensible enough. rules are going to develop based on how people treat each other, anyway. If nobody steps in, the whoever has the least compunction about being a jerk will define what's acceptable.

this is a recipe for "rule by the biggest asshole in the room" which (trust me on this, I'm in a law school and I know from experience) is not a good plan.

nomadologist said:

Yeah, the thing is, I understand not wanting the board to be overrun by sex and drugs talk. I do think some threads have been unnecessarily derailed by sex and drug stories. But many have been derailed by other inanity as well.

I just think it's really really unfeeling and strange to act like it's wrong (or "psychotic" or however Stelfox put it) for people to bring up struggles with mental illness. Talk about reinforcing social stigma. There have been plenty of really cogent discussions of mental illness and the pharmaceutical industry in the West etc. etc. that I found really interesting.

Click to expand...

word...

my issue is the defense of the concept of censoring sex, drugs, personal issues threads is "THERE IS A WHOLE NOTHER INTERNET OUT THERE", which i find silly...

i think the point is, people like THIS forum and like to talk to people on here, no?

i mean, the thing i like about dissensus is that it does have a community feeling to it...

if j3ss was someone who came on here and for their first post wrote a lost weekend diary, i can understand people getting fed up...

but her (and zhao) contribute to a lot of threads (including tons of the post-modern philosophical ones that i never click on)...

which raises two points:

a) if a thread does not interest you, simply don't click on it...

b) if someone is obviously contributing to "the community", can not their posts stand as a whole?

and the idea that personal experiences have no place on here is silly... i mean, talking about going to a show, that's a personal experience... or saying, back when i was a teenager who only listened to metal, i hated the swans is a personal experience...

i think j3ss is kinda dead-on about how some british people find the some americans public openess tacky... that is certainly the angle all the trolls on here take... me, i like to keep my shit close to my sleeve, i just wonder why anyone could give a fuck about what anyone else posts on the internet?

if the problem with j3ss's posts are that they are self-obsessed, well so be it... but, i can tell you that she is def. not posting shit here for shock value or to push people's buttons...


ANYWAYS, i think this is funny, as other boards i post on have like 1 deleted thread a week... drama all the time... in general, people are well behaved on here...

yes... uncensored self-expression is a good thing, it's a concept at the base of most tolerant and democratic societies.
thank you to the defenders of the free world for pointing this out.
the flipside of this is that a considerate individual should also possess the ability to shut up occasionally.

nomadologist said:

It's funny that people think you'd *have* to be making up the things that have happened in my life.

Click to expand...

My true confession is that I really, genuinely think that nomad is actually David Bowie.

I posted right at the start of this thread, not in defense of the other one having been deleted but in a misguided effort to prevent the free-speech / whatever discussion that I'm sure many of us have seen numerous times on the net. Obviously people still have things to say so perhaps I was wrong to try and do so but the point was that ultimately this space exists on a server owned by someone else.

But this...

stelfox said:

i come here to talk about music and to learn about other stuff that i know less about. i do not want to know about people's real or imagined drug histories, their real or imagined mental illnesses, their real or imagined confessions, their real or imagined sex lives or anything like that (real or imagined).

Click to expand...

...is a bit silly, possibly offensive and really just says that you don't want people to post stuff that you are not interested in or that you are not interested in them as people. I think those discussions are valuable and relevant, but if sometimes they are not to you, so what. There is more than one forum here and music doesn't exist in a vacuum.

i don't really think that absolutely uncensored weirdness was what this board was intended for, that's all.
it was a relatively nice, remarkably unfucked-up corner of the internet for a quite a while, barely needed moderating, and maintains many of those characteristics to this day.
i don't think people should be encouraged to play out mental problems on the internet. they should, instead, be encouraged to seek out the appropriate help from legitimately qualified people, not self-appointed experts.
taking that thread down was 1) the best thing to so because it pissed off several long-standing contributors to the board 2) it had the potential to upset many more 3) it was actually quite a kind and responsible thing to do because, had the initial poster had been thinking clearly, i'm sure they wouldn't have started it in the first place.
i'd rather not see that kind of thing on many levels and i think it was dealt with responsibly.
this isn't really a free speech or censorship issue, it's an issue of discretion.
as for my not believing or respecting a lot of what gets said here by some of our more prolific posters, well, that's really my prerogative.
there's a weird mix of arrant bullshit and narcissistic self-obsession about it all and it's quite difficult to deal with, especially considering that it derails more worthwhile discourse and debate.
if there were any way to avoid it or read around it, i would, but it occurs on almost *every* thread and is pretty tiresome after a while.
anyway, i'm not saying any more about this.

"...is a bit silly, possibly offensive and really just says that you don't want people to post stuff that you are not interested in or that you are not interested in them as people. I think those discussions are valuable and relevant, but if sometimes they are not to you, so what. There is more than one forum here and music doesn't exist in a vacuum."

Click to expand...

Yeah, spot on. There are lots of things I like on dissensus and lots I don't but to start appealing to some mysterious idea of what the board is supposed to be for to suppress conversations you don't like (as opposed to those that are clearly racist or offensive in some other manner) seems a bit weird to me.

there's nothing weird about it. nothing cynical or scary. dissensus is not a metaphor for the wider world. it's a message board, it was set up to be a smart polite and relatively undramatic alternative to the other options. lately it's often looked like a total freakshow, which has nothing to do with free speech, oppressive methods of social control or censorship or anything else. personally, i'd say that a lot of things that have happened/been said lately are far weirder than not wanting to see that kind of stuff here. and, yeah, noel, you're right. there are some posters who i am not at all interested in as people because i couldn't trust anything they say. this is the point where i leave this argument alone. it's a modded board. someone did something pretty stupid. it got sorted out, end of matter.

Haha, Mistersloane. Don't I wish.

Where are the "freak show" parts exactly? I've been missing out on those.

Also, no one, not one person, has ever tried to use this message board to my knowledge to give "professional help" to anyone else. One time people told someone they should go to their doctor to possibly adjust medication dosage because that person asked for advice. Big deal!

If you're some old introverted, stay-in, straight-edge curmudgeon, Stelfox, who can't believe that someone living in Bushwick Brooklyn can't find smack and do it or have worked in medical publishing, maybe that's *your* problem.

Not a lot of other people seem to care about what I post. Why does it bother you so?

brown neon said:

I don't think so. She's a dullard, an ear-bender on a bad night out. I love her posts though, it's like watching the first round of X Factor.

Click to expand...

i'd rather spend time with someone who talks too much than a snidey little creep who likes to assassinate people from the sidelines when they feel they are weakened enough by attacks from others to get away with it. at least stelfox is completely straight forward, and unlike you, actually engaged in the board to the same extent as nomad.

i distrust people like that, and if i can't trust you i'm not interested in spending time talking to you or giving a shit what you think, end of.

ripley said:

My impression is that Americans are censorious and simultaneously hold a deep love of the concept of freedom of speech. That's "censorious" if you understand censorship in the broadest sense, not in the literal sense of government suppression of speech. I think it's generally an American trait to hate hate HATE explicit rules about what you can and can't say (religious fundies aside, I guess ), but to condone an awful lot of silencing done through private or social means.

On another note, I really don't get talking about speech online as if the internet is one place ("i can just go elsewhere"), or even if Dissensus is a huge place. If it is huge, then deleting a thread on Dissensus (one tiny part of the internet) surely isn't censorship, since you have the rest of the internet (or Dissensus) to get your racist ramblings or personal attacks or whatnot from.

If the internet is not one single site for speech, but instead a lot of clusters and networks that are privately supported and organized, then having mods who define the social rules of engagement is sensible enough. rules are going to develop based on how people treat each other, anyway. If nobody steps in, the whoever has the least compunction about being a jerk will define what's acceptable.

this is a recipe for "rule by the biggest asshole in the room" which (trust me on this, I'm in a law school and I know from experience) is not a good plan.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I had a feeling someone must have posted some ethnic slur or other, and the deleting of that post was never what I meant to object to (I think there are quite a lot of sexist and racists posts on here that don't get the same treatment when maybe they could as well), but this snide insistence on going back to the idea that "longstanding members of the board" had some kind of huge problem with the way threads in the Misc section had played out is silly.

Stelfox has hated me ever since I made fun of music journalists once, and it's been all downhill from there. Personal vendettas on the internet are *so lame*...

If people don't stop the personal abuse, I will be dishing out some temporary bans very soon.

Without personalising things, it does seem that some posters here are magnetically attracted to having a ruck with others, or to threads which are basically about that.

All this is becoming very insular - a rubbish thread whining about another rubbish thread. Tiny beefs and personality clashes being magnified out of all proportion and then repeated, extended, intensified.

It is petty and despite the well-meaning "oh well don't read it then" posts, it is undeniably changing the nature of the board, for me at least.

john eden said:

It is petty

Click to expand...

agreed

To be fair, I think I have made some miserable, self-obsessed posts that I kind of regret. But I've never made known any personal info or gone into too much detail. What I think I was angling for was a proper discussion on topics like big pharma/brain chemistry/depression and creativity in general/anti-depressants as social control/whatevs... But it all got a bit "Whhaaa, I can't get a g/f!"

So... yeah.

nomadologist said:

Yeah, I had a feeling someone must have posted some ethnic slur or other, and the deleting of that post was never what I meant to object to (I think there are quite a lot of sexist and racists posts on here that don't get the same treatment when maybe they could as well), but this snide insistence on going back to the idea that "longstanding members of the board" had some kind of huge problem with the way threads in the Misc section had played out is silly.

Stelfox has hated me ever since I made fun of music journalists once, and it's been all downhill from there. Personal vendettas on the internet are *so lame*...

Click to expand...

It seems to me that you mention Stelfox at least as much as he mentions you, nomadologist.

If you see any racist or sexist posts then please report them to the moderators.

I don't really see what's wrong about personal information. I don't especially want to be identified, which is why I've made such a cloak-swishing enigma of myself but if other people want to talk about themselves/their experiences I think that's fine though granted, I am a nosey bastard.