No. of Recommendations: 17
From the number of recommendations and general observations of your posts, Wendy, it’s obvious that many many people absolutely love your articles being posted here on Shrewd’m.
Thank you for posting the text in a pleasant format.
Regarding the “Send” button, it is now solid; there should be no worry. Shrewd’m has a 100% independent programming base to the former TMF boards. The “Send” button should only fail if your internet connection was disconnected (or wifi fails etc), and even then the “go back” button will redisplay the text.
(With the earlier TMF boards it is possible, I humbly speculate, that the “Go back button” would trigger url forwarding causing the text to go missing, so such memories of losing posts might still be in one’s trauma.)
Regarding intervention of content, the way I view it is as follows:
Every person has a different perspective so concensus about content is hard to agree on. Yet there is one consensus that all agree - people act as intelligently as they reasonably can, respect each other, and are furthermore nice.
That sounds idiotically simple, but often best ideas are simple.
The reason it works so well is that being kind, not just superficially but really in spirit, causes others to want to reciprocate goodwill. The content moderating then becomes adaptively self-organized.
Regarding deciding what content should or should not appear: I tend to assume no individual is reliably able to décidé censorship rules without profound bias, even if one sincerely views oneself as objective and highly immune to bias.
If one is to understand, censorship, one must definitely understand the following - which amazingly few understand: if you’re in favor of free speech, then you need to be in favor of free speech that you absolutely despise - as lots of people are in favor of free speech that they like, such as Hitler, etc., so if you want free speech then you need to be in favor of free speech of not just ideas you like but precisely for ideas that you completely detest. Now, if you’re not in favor of free speech for the particular views you strongly despise, then you need to accept that you’re not in favor of free speech at all.
So that is my views on censorship. But that doesn’t preclude questions about organizing contents, which can be done by moving posts from one board to another occasionally or reminding to stay on topic - if the board was losing focus badly. But I’m extremely careful to avoid deleting any content —- I have never deleted a post to date except if requested by the author, or a spam post or some obvious fraud.
Exactly because of the ease at which I could intervene with content, I thus hold over myself an extremely high hurdle that I have to jump over in order to control content.
I’m not close to Buffett’s discipline .. so in métaphore only, similar as how Buffett only swings when really really sure about an investment, I will only swing with some “moderating” when I’m extremely sure there’s good reason for it.
Fortunately that is close to never, thanks to unique culture here.
Once you start censoring, which means controlling what others can write, you are then - to a serious extent - also controlling peoples thoughts, which I find a horrid concept. I think very few appreciate the extent of this connection and it’s one of the reasons I’m glad Shrewd’m exists.
This philosophy wouldn’t succeed in some domains, but Shrewd’m isn’t an arbitrary community - it has a particular culture (inherited from the 1990s AOL days through the old TMF early 2000 days) with a special spirit of thorough joy in communication, learning, independent rational thinking, a nice dose of humor —- and as corollary to all the above, some nostaogia and some fun irreverence towards Wall Street. (And quite a number of insanely successful investors stemming from that magic sauce.)
- Manlobbi
