Regruntled.com

Trend or coincidence? Recently I’ve come across two examples of deceptive censorship in computer forums. If the San Francisco Chronicle deletes your comment, the comment is invisible to other readers, but it remains visible to YOU, presumably so you don’t realize you’ve been censored and start complaining. (Thanks to TTB for the link.)

Prosper, the online lending platform, censors their forum. The lender community responded by setting up an alternate, uncensored forum at Prospers.org. (If you’re thinking about lending at Prosper, you REALLY need to read what the other lenders are saying in the uncensored forum.)

Well, OK, but how do people at Prosper.com find out about Prospers.org? It used to be possible to post at Prosper.com and mention Prospers.org. Now Prosper’s forum software automatically changes “prospers.org” to “prosper.com”. If you mention the competition, it’s turned into a mention of Prosper.

Both the Chronicle and Prosper are private businesses, and I really don’t have a problem with a bit of censorship to remove spam and maintain a civil atmosphere. However, I think they ought to be honest about their policies. Post the rules and provide a referee to enforce the rules, but don’t have secret rules that you enforce when no one is looking.

Here’s another experiment, for no particular reason.  The box below displays random paragraphs from Secret Ballet:

You can reload the page to get a new fragment.  I seem to be pushing the limits of Blogger.  When I do something like this, some things will work, and some things won’t.  I can publish this post, but I can’t edit it on Blogger, I have to delete it, edit it on my computer, and repost it.

For some reason I find Secret Ballet fascinating.  I keep wanting to read just a little bit more, even though I know the book was assembled from sample sentences in  a dictionary.  There’s nothing really there.

Is television news any different?  News is a business.  The stories are composed, packaged, teased and delivered by professional news readers.  There is a pretense of substance, the idea that something important actually happened, but on a slow news day, the news business fills the same amount of air time with no substance at all.

Maybe the fascination is that Secret Ballet doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.