Forum censorship - The Issue

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#116

I guess it’s a good time to revive this thread.
Case in point: 13 posts gone missing thanks to community jannies: [SOLVED] The new Jolla's 4.99eur/month Subscription model is too expensive for my budget - #144 by Vince

What about people flagging ideas they don’t agree with? You might cheer on people flagging pro-putin posts in auroraOS thread, but the only result from that is information going missing, auroraOS thread had a ton of posts removed just because the rest of the forum doesn’t agree EU is evil. Are you going to cheer on people flagging abortion-clinic app? (this is specifically crafted as both EU and russia love abortion on demand, so we can discuss something outside of ukraine where russians will agree with euros)

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#118

no need lol, it’s already happening, people are so polite to ‘somewhat related but incomprehensible posts’ they are afraid to flag obvious chatbots see Xperia VI devices moving from 21:9 aspect ratio screens to 19.5:9 - #22 by rgp, a chatgpt type bot got its post removed, its clearly russian operation kek (and it got likes too, the brave will save us)
edit: and just to spell it out, the bot answer took this:
PeegeeTips:

Re: changing from 21:9

Apparently not the 10vi !!!
Also no update to USB3 and Wifi6:

and provided some nonanswer in the type: while it’s a real shame sfos will not support usb3 and wifi6…
but it didn’t contain the line ‘as a large language model’ so people not only liked it but replied to it (therefore: my message is missing) kek

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#119

“Take revenge on this forum” Truly a reddit moment

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#120

guy posts a friendly request to get a spyapp built, not without our censor horde lol Here's the code for the European Digital Identity - #113

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#121

@vige @rainemak guys can we get your input, it seems a how to avoid the mass flaggers is now a daily topic that needs a faq, can you maybe tweak some discourse values? or properly address the topic if there are no values to tweak?

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#122

@throwaway69, just to confront you with the reality here at FSO: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

@vige

… is not a “sailor” (i.e. employee of Jollyboys): IIRC he left the company when Jolla was transformed into Jollyboys.

… it seems a how to avoid the mass flaggers is now a daily topic that needs a faq

There are FAQs for this from Jolla’s perspective: They are mentioned in this thread and copy the content of Discourse Inc.'s discourse FAQ, which IIRC resides in Discourse Inc.'s discourse instance.

can you maybe tweak some discourse values?

AFAIK sailors never did that, will not do that and likely cannot do that, because this discourse instance is a SaaS run by Discourse Inc. with its default configuration and Jolla likely choose to rent this forum software as SaaS to have no administration efforts at all; consequently I expect no sailor to have acquired the knowledge for that, actually that became quite clear in some of their replies in this thread.

At least this ensures, that this discourse instance behaves exactly as Discourse Inc.'s discourse instance: The details are denoted there.

or properly address the topic

As pointed out in this thread, discourse was likely chosen for FSO, because Discourse Inc. promises discourse to cause no moderation efforts at all, because “the community will moderate itself” by exactly the flagging and vanishing messages mechanisms discussed here. The first couple of years Jolla also strictly adhered to the no moderation premise, as you can read in this thread. I am very glad that this changed about a year ago, and I am also glad that the moderation is … well: moderate. But if you look more closely you might discover that the active moderators are all ex-sailors AFAICS.

TL;DR

Do not expect an answer, but the implicit answer (provided by actions, the lack of them, or the lack of answers which really answer something) is very likely a “No” to all your points.

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#123

Honestly, I don’t think you can call it censorship since the posts are still visible with an additional click. You might think that this is just a detail, but it’s not. People in China and Russia can go to jail for what they write on social medias, so please stop making this comparison, it doesn’t make any sense.
Moreover, this is a technical forum about SailfishOS, not a place where you are supposed to share your worldviews. I don’t flag posts, but I’m not surprised to see flags on posts that are completely off topic here (usually I read them anyways because I’m curious, so again no censorship).
Lastly, this has nothing to do with free speech. If you want to express your worldviews there are other platforms, this is not the right place.
Stay on topic and use a respectful language, it’s not that hard (although I understand many people including me are not native speakers and might have a different perception of “respectful language”, but that’s another topic).

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#124

That is not true: Please read this thread and / or the exact default behaviour of discourse in Discourse Inc.'s discourse instance.

In essence: The “hidden” messages are deleted after a few weeks.

You might think that this is just a detail, but it’s not.

Exactly: The automatic deletion of messages allows for making opinions invisible at first and then eradicated, which constitutes … censorship.

If you want to express your worldviews there are other platforms, this is not the right place.

As already denoted by others, some forum users seem to flag messages they do not like, regardless if they are off-topic or not.
Furthermore, in contrast to your example above it is often a matter of personal opinion to perceive a statement as off- or on-topic.

Stay on topic and use a respectful language, it’s not that hard (although I understand many people including me are not native speakers and might have a different perception of “respectful language”, but that’s another topic).

IMO this is hard to decide, as I pointed out in the prior section (WRT off-topic versus on-topic) and you correctly pointed our WRT respectful language (cultural background, technicians vs. “regular people”, etc.).

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#125

I think it is time to quit. Together.jolla was ok, but this forum doesn’t suit me. Flagging (often arbitrairily) and hearts by ‘the community’, mails from anonymous persons, weird posts by some, it’s not a nice place. Yet there always were also persons whose contributions I really appreciated.
Thank you for the information.
Goodbye and good luck to you all.

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#126

I think the solution is to keep the off-topic talks on separate threads, where off-topic means “does not answer on the post title” (the title is constantly displayed on top of the page even when replying).

When consulting the main page of the forum, it should be clear what I am going to find if I click a thread that signals 20 new messages. The one we talk about is entitled “Here’s the code for the European Digital Identity”. But many or most of the activity related to a debate on online privacy, which deserved its own thread but instead buried a technical discussion in section “Feature requests”.

Here we are discussing “Forum censorship” as per the title, and there are see much fewer of these flagged/hidden posts. Because the philosophical discussion is here on-topic, and readers who don’t care about it don’t even click on the thread so they don’t click on Flag icon either.

I respect @Kea 's decision to leave the forum, but I think it is unnecessary. We can just create new threads when we want to drift the discussion to other topics, with explicit titles like this one, and everybody is happy.

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#127

This assessment is wrong, there were many posts flagged in this thread, but as they are all older than a few weeks they became deleted.

I doubt that your post fulfils your requirement, because it deals with what you consider being off-topic and how you want this to be handled, not the issue of forum censorship, i.e. the sequence flagging, hiding then auto-deleting posts.

So, do you want me to flag it as “off-topic”? Then you can open a “separate thread” as you suggested. :wink:

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#128

Same here. Too bad that there is no delete account option. Goodbye everyone!

#129

I doubt that your post fulfils your requirement

I am discussing what I think is a solution to “Forum censorship”, which is the title topic. My solution is to keep technical posts technical, such that the censorship question is limited to the philosophical threads that only a subset of readers will open, also minimizing discontent.

I agree with you that the criteria are subjective. I refrained from commenting until now because I also don’t like to contribute to the flooding of a technical forum with opinions and creation of more discontent.

For people who are into “flagging” and who are reading this, one option is to “mute” topics you don’t like, so you keep your blood pressure lower and don’t feel the need to “Flag”. However, this requires the collaboration of all, such that philosophical discussions are kept separate from the technical ones.

As an example, I will mute this topic (“Forum censorship - The issue”) for myself, but I can’t mute “Here’s the code for the European Digital Identity” because it’s a technical SFOS discussion and these sort of things is why I’m here.

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#130

For a good understanding: I am not against moderation. It’s a fact that social media can trigger some people to post the most extreme ideas. But moderation should not be done anonymously by ‘the community’. Whatever that is. Flagging secretly reminds of secret police. It creates an atmosphere of distrust. A trained and skilled person should be moderator. Someone who is accountable.

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#131

If there was a setting to keep the flagged/hidden behind a click posts forever until a mod decides to actually remove it, it would help a lot, keep your reddit type groupthink enhancing behaviour, but don’t remove informative posts just because a certain group got triggered by differing views, at this point it’s just straight up censorship and hurts the forum
Edit: oh wait, it is an option: The persistence of posts hidden by flags are a bane to our community - #37 by Lhc_fl - ux - Discourse Meta
@rainemak is our discourse too old to have it? Consider tweaking those groups if not?
Then there’s this from 2019, so some should at least be in place and ready for tweaking (if there is will): User Reputation and Flag Priorities - Site Management - Discourse Meta
Maybe it can be tweaked per thread, so geopolitics adjacent threads don’t lose information just because of flag-happy few, not sure
Edit2: and it is open source, so even if discourse does not provide a checkbox, getting a shell script to comment out the actual process doing it should also be pretty ez, just let us know if you’re using docker/podman, people will figure out a way (funnily enough over there it’s mostly cries for more censorship), not really buying @olf’s argument that jolla is stuck in vanilla mode and can’t tweak things, we have custom categories/tags, you name it, commenting out their cron.php is probably not accessible from admin gui, but definitely doable

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#132

@throwaway69 kind of our discourse is to blame and reason for that is esr78. One step at the time.

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#133

As stated (and in detail already long ago) Jolla is using a Discourse instance as SaaS, i.e. run by Discourse Inc.

not really buying @olf’s argument that jolla is stuck in vanilla mode and can’t tweak things

This is not what I wrote, just that they never changed any setting up to now. Actually I am pretty sure Jolla can either change any setting by themselves or ask Discourse Inc. to change a setting for them (if Jolla does not have admin access), but Jolla seems to be extremely reluctant to do so. IMO you think way too much on the level of technical possibilities, which many people at Jolla would have been capable of researching and configuring all the time, but very likely they choose Discourse and rented Discourse as SaaS, because Discourse Inc. promises zero moderation and zero admin effort. Just take a look at the first reply here or the sailor responsible for this forum back then is “surprised” to see how Discourse works (read the prior message for context) to comprehend my impression.

But maybe it is helpful to research and suggest very specific configuration option changes and to explain concisely why you consider an option change to alleviate the issues experienced, instead of simply asking for certain “features” of the forum to be made behave differently.

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#134

Yes and no, from my pov it’s more like no sailor wants to get into investigating/tinkering with a whole system stack delivered as an image they just need to bootstrap with their branding and voila it works, what if something breaks? Why even bother. Pretty sure they have console access to force a restart (or do update that breaks the forum on our mobile browser and then to revert), not worth the effort. They definitely have access to detailed logs, not sure what admin gui from discourse provides (so I assume also toggling debug mode, but not 100% sure). If the cheapest saas option from discourse is they take care of everything from domain registration, through hosting etc… Maybe, but pretty sure as open source solution you can just use their docker image (github.com/discourse/discourse_docker) and maybe pay for support in case things go wrong to get back up in working state relatively fast (but again, tweaking the configs/images makes that just more likely, so if it’s not in admin gui, probably not worth the effort)

#135

Nope, Jolla does not get anything “delivered” and hence also do not bootstrap anything. Please read!

#136

Can you point to a proof in your often quoted message? If they use base docker image and only tweak/brand few things the FAQ will also be default, not a proof as you seem to be 100% sure, pls the proof part (bootstrapping is also changing config values for docker img, so branding changes would also count btw)

1 Like