Every online community has moderation to some degree. The manipulation, voting bots and endless stream of sockpuppet accounts made it impossible for people like me to discuss ideas and proposals, the signal-the-noise ratio was unbearable to the point of stopping productive discussions to an halt.
Yes, moderation sucks. But no moderation sucks harder. I don't really see a better approach to this.
If you have some time, I truly recommend you to read the "Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism" piece on LessWrong:
Again, people aren't taking issue with simple moderation. They are taking issue with the fact that certain view points are totally censored from the forum. I would be willing to bet 100% of the comments I've made in this thread would be deleted by moderators in /r/bitcoin simply for the fact that I'm expressing views counter to those they want to promote. I have high confidence they won't be moderated here though. Clearly something is different about /r/biticon censorship vs. HN moderation.
The simple fact that some of my comments even have the word "censorship" in them means they will be automatically deleted from /r/bitcion.
Bleh. There is no automatic deletion. I've tested this multiple times. Also I've mentioned altcoins, bitcoin unlimited in a positive light, and everything else people say is moderated away. I've never been censored once. Downvoted - sure. Censored... nope.
The only way to guarantee censorship is to make 100 fake accounts and then upvote an article that promotes a hard fork or alt coin.
Spam, fake upvoted articles, and personal attacks are attempted to be moderated. There is, no doubt, a bias that moderators have for certain topics.
But without moderation, any forum would be overrun with spew.
Comments are not being deleted on r/bitcoin for expressing views, discussing ideas or debating proposals.
Comments that promote the use of alternative clients that attempt to alter the bitcoin protocol rules prior to building consensus around the proposal, however, are. An hardfork protocol change that does not have significant support from the community is basically an altcoin that starts from the current UTXO set, and so is considered off-topic for r/bitcoin.
Would you say that the r/bitcoin moderators removing posts about ethereum as being off-topic also engage in "censorship"?
> Comments are not being deleted on r/bitcoin for expressing views, discussing ideas or debating proposals.
Yes they are.
> Comments that promote the use of alternative clients that attempt to alter the bitcoin protocol rules prior to building consensus around the proposal, however, are.
Comments promoting non-core clients are. Segwit is a disruptive change to the protocol and yet is has been allowed since day one. And also: how are you supposed to building consensus if it's censored? The cognitive dissonance is amazing.
> An hardfork protocol change that does not have significant support from the community is basically an altcoin that starts from the current UTXO set, and so is considered off-topic for r/bitcoin.
A hardfork doesn't an altcoin make. "Significant support from the community" is a misnomer. Bitcoin is built around nakomoto consensus, not some flimsy community definition.
> Would you say that the r/bitcoin moderators removing posts about ethereum as being off-topic also engage in "censorship"?
When negative posts are allowed then yes it's obvious.
> Comments promoting non-core clients are [being removed].
No, they are not. Promoting alternative client software that is compatible with the Bitcoin protocol is definitely allowed. btcd, NBitcoin, Bitcoin Knots, Toshi, Haskoin, bcoin, Bitcoin-S and pynode are all allowed, because they're all compatible with the protocol are not trying to forcefully deploy an hardfork that has no consensus.
> how are you supposed to building consensus if it's censored? The cognitive dissonance is amazing.
Discussion of ideas and proposals is not censored. You are free to build consensus by discussing your proposal and convincing other stakeholders in the ecosystem to support it. But you cannot go ahead, skip the discussion part, and promote a controversial non-compatible client that is highly likely to hardfork the chain and split bitcoin into two currencies.
All in all, people seem to agree with the moderation policy of r/bitcoin. Everyone are well aware of these policies, yet it is still the most popular bitcoin forum. Apparently people like it when their community moderators makes it possible to conduct productive discussions by removing noise.
> Bitcoin is built around nakomoto consensus, not some flimsy community definition.
"Satoshi Nakmoto" was meant to give the miners one power: deciding which transactions to include in their blocks. It was never meant to be used to decide on the protocol rules and the validity of chains.
Altering the bitcoin protocol requires consent from the entire bitcoin ecosystem, not just the miners.
> trying to forcefully deploy an hardfork that has no consensus.
This doesn't make any sense. By definition a hardfork can only be successful if it has consensus.
> Discussion of ideas and proposals is not censored.
Keep deceiving yourself.
> All in all, people seem to agree with the moderation policy of r/bitcoin. Everyone are well aware of these policies, yet it is still the most popular bitcoin forum.
The logical fallacy is strong in this one.
> It was never meant to be used to decide on the protocol rules and the validity of chains.
Wrong again, that's the whole point. Why am I arguing with someone who obviously doesn't understand how bitcoin works and openly support censorship? Just a waste of time.
> By definition a hardfork can only be successful if it has consensus.
Nope. BU has no threshold in place. If it had a 95% or even 80% consensus level built in, the resistance to it would be 1/10th of what it is now.
> Keep deceiving yourself.
Try it. Try posting something promoting BU, and don't go and try to pump it up with fake votes. Sure it will be unpopular - because BU is broken software - but it won't get moderated away.
No, miners do not decide no the validity of blocks. It is the whole network who does so. If the miners ever try to cheat the system (creating more coins than they should, steal money that doesn't belong to them, etc) their blocks would be rejected by the rest of the network as invalid.
> Why am I arguing with someone who obviously doesn't understand how bitcoin works.
I actually happen to be a software developer that founded a bitcoin startup, so I think I'm at least somewhat qualified for this. https://www.bitrated.com/
Every online community has moderation to some degree. The manipulation, voting bots and endless stream of sockpuppet accounts made it impossible for people like me to discuss ideas and proposals, the signal-the-noise ratio was unbearable to the point of stopping productive discussions to an halt.
Yes, moderation sucks. But no moderation sucks harder. I don't really see a better approach to this.
If you have some time, I truly recommend you to read the "Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism" piece on LessWrong:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/