RD.net - for information

[Styrer]

As much as many of you may now wince at hearing anything to do with RD.net, I'd like to offer you this exchange since my banning there some weeks ago, for information and, perhaps, some colour.

Please read from bottom to top if you want to follow the chronology of the posts. As ever, comments welcome, including any as to how much of a dick I've been to think that any other eventuality could really transpire. And if anyone wants to call me a 'cunt', then I'd welcome it and ask the mods here to turn a blind eye. Such is, after all, my point at the end of the day.

Thanks,

Styrer

-------------------------------



Dear Sir or Madam

Thank you for your kind reply.

I have no doubt that you and your moderating team have confidence in ‘your vision’ as to how RD.net should proceed.

As a member since 2007, who joined in a climate where the very notion of upbraiding a religious person was seen as social anathema, and where the worthy and wonderfully educative stance of calling someone infused with religious idiocy an ‘idiot’ was not a faux pas but a means by which learning could take place, I sadly conclude that your ‘vision’, as you rather grandiloquently term it, presents only a dulled and retrograde-looking vista of a once brilliant site.

While you might not wish to take note that a huge swathe of the very many members once privileging your site, and by way of it, Dawkins himself, have now gone for good because of the ‘vision’ you are now putting into practice, you might want to try to measure the value and substance of your own ‘Deleted by Moderator’ comments on such threads denouncing the prohibitions placed on freedom of expression and of speech in such places as Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

While the OIC are to this day placing heady pressure on the UN, whose capitulating and fearful members are only too ready to introduce to all of us some form of ‘self-censorship’ through bullying via religious diktat, your website should really be standing proud as a defiant enemy of censorship and its concomitant denial to us of any such offering. Yet what we now have with RD.net is an increasingly censorious team who not only censor but also delete, and making any interested newcomer an immediate hostage to your own form of censorship. In such circumstances, it is hard to discern quite how you are encouraging learning as a function of reason and rationality.

I have truly enjoyed my time on the site over the years, and the vigorous and enlightening debates which I’ve always associated with the site, and I shall always be grateful for how much I have learnt through the sheer cut-and-thrust of argumentation, not least by seeing ‘idiots’ exposed as ‘idiots’ and termed exactly that.

I regret that I shall not be seeking re-instatement on RD.net as it now stands.

Though I believe you have lost your way, and have reprehensibly destroyed a once open and uncensored website uniquely fashioned in furtherance of reason, you do have my best wishes going forward.


Sean Tyrer (Styrer)



From: Moderator Team [mailto:moderator@richarddawkins.net]
Sent: 08 August 2010 22:38
To: info@the-language-house.com
Cc: moderator@richarddawkins.net
Subject: Re: Unfair Moderation

Dear Styrer

Commentators are only ever blocked for repeatedly breaching our Terms of Use. Aggressive posts, abusive posts, off-topic posts and posts re-posted after being removed by a moderator are all examples of the kind of thing that count as unacceptable. We would not expect you to agree that your posts have frequently fallen into this category - if you agreed with us on the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable posts, we would not have felt the need to remove you as a user, after all - but the Terms of Use make it clear that it is our vision for the site that will determine how we manage it.

If, on re-reading our Terms of Use, you feel able to assure us that any future posts you make will comply with them, we would be prepared to reinstate your posting rights. However, you must understand that any further breach of our Terms of Use would result in a permanent ban. If you would like to be reinstated on this basis, please let us know.

Best wishes
The Moderation Team



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Language House School of English <info@the-language-house.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 7:41 PM
Subject: Unfair Moderation
To: moderator@richarddawkins.net


Sir or Madam



I trust you will grant me the courtesy of explaining quite why so many
of my posts have been deleted and precisely why you have blocked my
ability to comment.



Styrer

[Bella Fortuna]

Sean, I think you made some excellent points very articulately as well as conveying your emotional reaction. Alas, as it has been ever since this whole thing blew up, there is little chance that anyone in control of things over there will be moved by any argument or appeal. And it's their profound loss in terms of both quality of intelligent, quick-witted members, and the accumulated knowledge base and reference material they've willfully chucked away.

[Styrer]

Thanks, Bella. There is, in what I said, the possible charge of hubris, of arrogance and self-importance. Who am I to count the deletion of some of my vacuous posts along with the rife censorship in those countries I mentioned? Might seem a fair point. But the counter to that is - of course - if my posts are so pathetically insignificant in the first place, why delete them? Surely that would be granting them far more significance than they deserve. Must the masses really be protected so steadfastly from my dangerous inanities? Whichever way I've looked at this, considering even that Dawkins once said he never wanted censorship to enter the front pages, some nauseating capitulation has taken place which I find hard to fathom. The threads there (which never number many) and the number of posts in those threads (which equally never number very many) now have huge lacunae where only 'Deleted by Moderator' comments stand. It is one thing to reprimand, and another thing entirely to delete. It sits very badly with me. Not only does the deleted comment never get an airing on behalf of its originator, but equally I never get to read it and make my own judgement.

Sorry for my rant, but this stuff bothers me intensely.

Hope you're in good form, by the way.

Styrer

[Trolldor]

It's their website, as many people keep saying, and they're entitled to completely destroy it however they wish.

[Styrer]

Certainly it's their site. But the presumptuous notion that the newcomers to the site owe a debt of gratitude to its creator is obscenely wrong. It's been nauseatingly said that it is a privilege to be a member of such a site, and that one should treat it with respect and be grateful for the chance to participate. What shite. When one starts a site, it is the new members who, in perhaps increasing numbers, privilege the owner of that site with their thought and consideration, with their time and attention. Without the members, there is no site of any import at all.

I remember last year one member dripping contempt all over a new-comer, who had rather coherently challenged Dawkins' stance on the Bill Maher Award, by saying something along the lines of 'how dare you come into Richard's house and shit on his carpet'. There is a fundamental breakdown in comprehension here. It is not a house, and even if we say that it is, it is built by the site's members. Watch how such a 'house' falls without members to support it. Dawkins would very quickly be talking to himself and posting articles related to reason and rationality for only his own delectation.

Absurd.

Styrer

[Cunt]

If a forum has a rule which forbids the presentation of the letter 'x', and you post x's there, not only are you kicked out, you are a rule-breaking whachamacallit.

If, however, the administration deletes all incedents of you posting x's, then you are no longer breaking any rules...since they are deleted, maybe you never broke the rules in the first place.

I don't get it. Maybe it has something to do with selling videos and t-shirts...

[Styrer]

Maybe so, Cunt. Cheers.

To Bella again - I just wanted to touch on the 'emotional' bit you mentioned. Yes, indeed. Over three years, I felt part of something supremely useful, beyond the scope of my own business and concerns. It was very important to me and even those members with whom I had frantic arguments kept in touch with me via PM. You'll know that this feature is no longer in play, of course, which indicates a wilful refusal to recognise the very human nature of solidarity which drew all of us together in the first place. To now know that this very human aspect meant nothing at all to the site is a hard blow. 'Emotional'. Yes, indeed.

All good wishes,
Styrer

[JimC]

I agree that the demise of the old RD forum is an emotional blow. Sites like Ratz may provide much of the community feel and zany anarchy we enjoyed there in its heyday, but the old RD forum also had a world class arena of scientific, evolutionary and religious debate that we are merely a pale imitation of... :sighsm:

[Trolldor]

Certainly it's their site. But the presumptuous notion that the newcomers to the site owe a debt of gratitude to its creator is obscenely wrong. It's been nauseatingly said that it is a privilege to be a member of such a site, and that one should treat it with respect and be grateful for the chance to participate. What shite. When one starts a site, it is the new members who, in perhaps increasing numbers, privilege the owner of that site with their thought and consideration, with their time and attention. Without the members, there is no site of any import at all.

I remember last year one member dripping contempt all over a new-comer, who had rather coherently challenged Dawkins' stance on the Bill Maher Award, by saying something along the lines of 'how dare you come into Richard's house and shit on his carpet'. There is a fundamental breakdown in comprehension here. It is not a house, and even if we say that it is, it is built by the site's members. Watch how such a 'house' falls without members to support it. Dawkins would very quickly be talking to himself and posting articles related to reason and rationality for only his own delectation.

Absurd.

Styrer

Yes, well, my comment about 'destroying it however they wish' was a rough allusion to all this.

[lordpasternack]

You've more confidence/patience than I have, Sean. I never even bothered to ask why I was banned - which as it happens happened before the new site actually went up.

I read the site for news, but I have approximately zero confidence in those running the show and moderating comments. There isn't, so far as I can see, any official procedure with respect to suspensions as opposed to permabannings - no official procedure for challenging any decisions. I wasn't even aware that there was an email address for the faceless moderation team. Add to that certain parts of the Terms of Use are just ridiculously subjective and utterly inane in parts and it's just a huge pile of "meh". It smacks, as it has from day one - of blatant naivety of what makes such a site good and well-run - and of management that I'd just rather ignore and get on with my life rather than trying to protest anything. My only response is a weak mental facepalm.

And yes, I will be so presumptuous as to say that my banning is a loss to their site. Surely not a big loss - but it definitely not a gain, and definitely south of breaking even, all the same. I'll just take a mental note of it for schadenfreude purposes should I ever make any notable achievements in science in the future.

[lordpasternack]

And to the people who keep talking about how the site is "theirs" and how Richard clearly thinks this, and blah, blah, blah - honest to fucking Christ - read Richard's recent comments, and count the number of times he's rather naughtily and ambiguously referred to the site as "our site".

http://richarddawkins.net/users/53/comments

If you don't want to plough through comments, you can always do a quick bit of Ctrl F, of course.