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| TL;DR Repubs are about 50% of the country and Caltrops doesn't censor them by blackwater 04/01/2019, 11:42am PDT | ||||
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| I remember back when the internet was new. People would post on this thing called Usenet, and there was little to no censorship. It was basically a party line, and anyone could throw a message in. Usenet was kind of a commons, like email -- nobody "owned" it. (OK, OK, technically, there was moderation on some parts of Usenet, but it was opt-in and it was not a big part of the experience.)
Then came the web forums, and most of them seemed to have heavy-handed moderation policies in place. Places like Slashdot all had a lot of groupthink going on. If you challenged that-- for example, by saying that Linux might not be the best OS for absolutely everything-- you would be punished severely, or possibly even banned from the site. We all rolled our eyes at that, but it was fine, we all understood that Slashdot was not the internet, and the things they liked might not be the things everyone liked. (They hated the ipod!) Then came Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it, and everything just got 10x worse. People started to think that their little bubble was what "everyone" thought. So clearly if you were not a Democrat you were a fascist Nazi klansman stormtrooper, or something. These sites made it very hard to stay anonymous, so the more reasonable people started dropping out of the discussion entirely since they didn't want retaliation against them. And so the discussion was dominated by-- for lack of a better word-- bullies on both the right and the left. Caltrops is one of the few places that still keeps the spirit of the original internet. There are both left-wing and right-wing posters here, and there have been for a long time. I don't know how much longer that will last. The political discussion isn't that high quality these days, and I wouldn't blame Jonesey for just saying "no politics" or something. But that would probably require a lot more effort to enforce than I think he's willing to put forth, and it would feel contrary to the spirit of the site anyway. I don't know where I'm going with this. I just think it's kind of amusing to see someone stumble in here and say "Hey! How come this place isn't censored like it should be? There could be nazis or pedophiles? Or the boogeyman?" |
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