Read this before it gets erased. Does anyone have an explanation for why Hillary Blogs are deleting diaries, erasing comments, and suspending the accounts of people left and right? Are any neutral or Obama-leaning bloggers doing this? I know that most Clinton supporters voluntarily stopped posting here when I came out for Obama, but the few that remain aren’t censored or troll-rated, and as long as they make good faith arguments they get good faith responses.
It just seems to me that this censorship at Hillary Blogs is a metaphor for something much greater. It’s almost as if they can’t sustain an open debate without being driven from the field on their own turf.
I know MyDD and Daily Kos have long had their taboo topics, which has always been somewhat problematic. But this is the first time I’ve seen people get banned for talking about a candidate.
It’s creepy.
Update [2008-4-30 15:14:16 by BooMan]: Bob Johnson’s diary wasn’t deleted, it was artificially taken off the recommended list. How do I know? Booman Tribune and MyDD are both driven off of SCOOP. While I had the recommended diary feature written separately from MyDD, they both work off a formula. It works like this. Each recommendation is weighted evenly. But a recommendation’s power wanes over time. You can tinker with the formula to speed up or slow down the rate at which a recommendation degrades, but they all degrade at the same rate. I have no power to alter the rankings. Whatever the community decides should be on the recommended list is what is on the recommended list. To take something off the recommended list I either have to delete it, put it in a ‘never display’ mode, or promote it to the front-page. But Jerome has obviously built in a feature whereby he can mess with his community’s rankings. Bob Johnson posted his diary at 12:39 and it has 42 recommendations. The top ranked diary at MyDD right now was posted at 11:07 and has 31 recommendations.
Depending on the setting for speed of recommendation degradation, recommendations on these diaries may have already lost some of their power, but the older diary would suffer more degradation than the newer. Therefore, even though it is possible for a diary to be ranked higher on the MyDD recommended list while having less recommendations, it is not possible that Bob Johnson’s diary is ranked lower than the highest ranking diary currently displayed at MyDD. That is because Bob’s diary is both newer and has more recommendations.
In other words, Jerome has set up a totally corrupt system for his recommended diaries. As a SCOOP man, I find this disgracefully unethical.
