Comment 42570

By highwater (registered) | Posted June 29, 2010 at 09:41:10

Yet the power to silence carries an insidious scope creep. It turns out to be quite a small stumble to reason from truly abusive comments to trolls all the way to mere contrarians, and by the end of the exercise, the discussion is so emasculated by censorship chill as to be scarcely worth following, let alone joining.

My fear is that the precedent set by deleting harmful comments could ultimately prove to be more harmful still.

So my personal inclination is pretty strongly against censorship, but RTH has to be about what its community wants, and I'm open to a respectful discussion of possibilities. If a specific, objective plan comes out of it, I'm willing to put it to the community for a vote.

I share these concerns. Lets face it. We've only had two incidents that I can recall, and they were both met with overwhelming and unequivocal disapproval by the community. That seems sufficient to me for the time being. If these kinds of incidents become more prevalent, then it might be time to rethink, but I don't think these two incidents have dealt more than glancing blows to the quality of dicussion here. It's too soon to get heavy-handed IMO.

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