

Disqus the Censorship Machine - UserRights
http://imgur.com/OCyuNAV

======
dalke
Short version: Automatic spam filtering is censorship and the spirit of the US
First Amendment requires that everyone host all comments.

I believe this is a false understanding, which places free speech on a
pedestal over other human rights.

Freedom of assembly also means the right for private persons to exclude others
from participation. A club can hire a bouncer from a local security firm to
prevent certain classes of people from entering (eg, drunk, inappropriately
dressed, or known troublemakers; so long as its not legally prohibited
discrimination), without specifically telling the bouncer all of the
conditions for exclusion.

~~~
UserRights
Where is spam in the post that shows this picture? Nowhere.

What does this tell us about spam detection algorithms?

How does your startup handle user rights?

Why are you writing about freedom of assembly here? No relation to censorship.

~~~
dalke
1) This (poorly written) comment concerns spam. I didn't say that the comment
itself was spam.

(Edit: I see now the tag "Detected as spam." I rarely use Disqus and didn't
catch it the first few times I looked at it.)

2) Spam detection algorithms are hard. There are false negatives.
[https://disqus.com/home/channel/discussdisqus/discussion/cha...](https://disqus.com/home/channel/discussdisqus/discussion/channel-
discussdisqus/detected_as_spam_is_getting_tedious/) suggests that Disqus has
many problems, but without knowing the baseline rate, it's hard to judge if
it's really bad. (If it stops 1 billion spam comments per day, and falsely
categorizes 10 real ones, but all 10 complain, then it will appear that there
is a high failure rate.)

3) Huh?! I don't have a startup. I sell software under a free license.

4) You must have missed the part which says "against the spirit of the
constitution of the USA". Free speech and freedom to assemble are equally part
of the first amendment. If you want to protect user rights, you have to
protect _all_ of them, and realize they are sometimes in tension with each
other.

Otherwise, chance your account name to "FreeSpeechRights".

