Raise the Hammer

In your comments, you insisted against any reasonable definition of "censorship" that a voting system that never denies any visitor the ability to read any comment somehow constitutes censorship.

Then, after deciding that downvoting equals censorship rather than censure, you determined that the voting system doesn't work because some comments attract more than the minimum number of comments required to hide a comment under the default settings, meaning that some people read the comment after it had already been downvoted.

Your conclusion is cute "gotcha" reasoning from faulty premises about both the intent and the effect of comment voting.

The purpose of comment voting is not to deny anyone the ability to read a comment; it is to allow the members of the RTH community to establish a shared awareness that a comment is inappropriate so people feel less obliged to reply to it.

In no way does it prevent anyone from reading any comment - and nor is that its intent. After all, it's pretty hard to establish shared awareness about a comment if people can't read it.

Of course, you're welcome to claim and to try and argue that not preventing people from reading comments somehow constitutes censorship. Likewise, others are welcome to argue that your claim doesn't make sense. And anyone who chooses to register an account is welcome to flag your respective comments as fair or inappropriate.

Now, after having made a claim about censorship to which several people responded specifically, you seem to be lamenting a lost opportunity to discuss the matter of censorship. A discussion is what you invited, and a discussion is exactly what you got - but you seem unwilling to acknowledge the fact, pointed out by several people, that the premise of your argument is faulty.

Instead of responding to this, you decided to post a passive-aggressive comment with a full paragraph dedicated to a personal attack against one of the people who replied to you. That, I suspect, is why your third comment was significantly downvoted when your first two were not.

Incidentally, being downvoted for a given comment does not mean you are being labelled a troll. It simply means some people thought that particular comment was inappropriate.

A troll is someone who persistently posts inappropriate and offensive comments and actively seeks to drag down the general level of civility and productiveness. The voting system applies case-by-case specifically so as not to write people off as trolls just because of a few inappropriate comments.

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