[bitcoin-dev] Censorship

I am not sure that this is on-topic for the bitcoin-dev mailing list, but it seems politically relevant enough that I'm going to respond. /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.org are both discussion websites that pertain to a specific topic. All (or nearly all) discussion websites pertaining to a specific topic have a set of rules that get enforced to facilitate relevant and interesting discussion. These rules help to block spam, and help to make sure that discussions happen in their appropriate places. The rules in place on the two primary bitcoin discussion sites have helped facilitate a large userbase frequented by many relevant experts. I do believe that we can thank the strict moderation policies for much of the activity that happens which is technically interesting. /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.org are both centralized forums. As such, the rules are going to be set by a centralized authority. The rules set have been set to keep the discussion as interesting and relevant as possible. When a certain theme becomes a massive echo chamber or little more than beating a dead horse, it makes sense to implement moderation. Calling it 'censorship' is misleading, because a government authority is not threatening punishment for the discussion of a certain topic. People are not banned from visiting forums or websites where off-topic (or against-the-rules) discussion is happening. People's /r/bitcoin rights are not being revoked because they are subscribed to a controvertial subreddit. That would be censorship. Many people are clearly unhappy with the moderation happening on /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.org. Luckily, the switching cost for online discussion forums is very low. I'm now going to invite people to post links to bitcoin discussion forums where the moderation authority is different. I know that a recently popular subreddit is /r/bitcoin_uncensored I am interested to see what other forums people think are worth mentioning. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150822/83360e1e/attachment.html>