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Some people call this censorship. We've been through that conversaion over and over again. Censorship is a thing governments do. When a publisher cuts or rejects content, it's called editing and that's the way the world works.
We call it doing our jobs to maintain OEN as a place people want to come and spend their time reading, conversing and sharing ideas.
We do have some rules-- no hate speech and WE the editors are the arbiters of that. And we believe that people can strongly disagree without calling names.
We, the editors, believe that this approach will make the OEN experience a better, more pleasant one. People who need to call names and get nasty will ultimately find that they are not welcome at OEN. If you're smart enough to have an intelligent opinion, you need to be emotionally smart enough to disagree with civility. I am personally working my hardest at living up to these rules.
In the coming weeks, we're rebuilding our commenting system-- new software to make it faster and easier to post comments, using "ajax" software, so you'll be able to see the article and other comments while you are creating your comment. And we'll have a better system to deal with flagged comments, back panel-wise.
These will also enable us to see patterns of abuse by members. We really want an open forum where there's freedom to discuss ideas, but when it comes to nastiness and incivility, we're drawing the line.
