byolinux's Journal: The fun of zoo.pl

Every day on Slashdot, you see posts that you disagree with, you read posts and sigs written by people you'd dislike if you knew them in real life, but occasionally you find people who are trying to do something destructive.

One such user is Profanity Blacklist, who adds people to their foes if they post vulgarity on Slashdot. To me, this is dumb. Really fucking dumb. It's censorship and I don't like it... when I discovered this, I added all the fans of the user to my foes list - thinking that I'd cause some of them to sit up and take notice. However, what I forgot to do, was check the foes list too as some of the people on there are also listed as fans.

This is an interesting situation: It seems that if you get added as a foe by this user, and then add this user as a friend it might do something out of the ordinary.

But I didn't check.

I added people to my foes list and then today, I find someone's left me an offline message on ICQ...

Eh, this is SeanDuggan from /.
I noticed you've marked me as a foe. Since I don't think I know you from Adam and a quick browsing of the post history doesn't seem to indicate we've stepped on each others' posts, I'm curious as to why the relationship change. You're perfectly welcome to, of course, but I'm always curious as to the whys of things. Heck, could be it's some negative personality trait I can fix.

Seems friendly enough. I check him out - sure enough, he was added as a foe and sure enough, he has a blog post explaining that suddenly - he has two foes and one is the Profanity Blacklist. Whoops! Now, I actually bother to check, I see that not only is he a pretty cool guy, but also he posted something that made me laugh when George Carlin said it, and made me laugh again on Slashdot when I read it back, which is a rare thing indeed.

Anyway, I'm going to keep myself as his foe until I've spoken to him, explain why I'm a trigger happy Brit at times and hope we can go for some cold ones sometime.

This post is Creative Commons ShareAlike-Attribution-NonCommercial licensed.

Why...

[FroMan]

Why should you care?

First and foremost, this is not censorship. Censorship would be removing the posts by the editors. Even then, that is not censorship in the fashion that is truly dangerous, censorship by the government.

Basically you seem to have an issue with someone that is gaming the system which usually only allows 100 foes/friends but added a second account to add modifiers to foes of friends. But the person who setup the account is really the only one affected by this (and whoever friends/foes

Re:Why...

[byolinux]

I think that adding people to a list because they are profane on a website goes against the ideas of free speech.

If they want to block people for swearing, I have no problem blocking them in return.

Re:Why...

[FroMan]

Since when does the idea of free speech require someone to listen to you? That would actually be forced speech, not free speech for the listener. All these folks are doing is filtering content before it reaches them.

How do you feel about moderations then? That is effectively doing the same. Do you give friends/foes adjustments? That is the same thing. Do you not read everything on every articles, since to do otherwise would be the same thing. Do you read all your spam instead of filtering for it? A

My apologies

[SeanDuggan]

As the person who started the matter, I made the Profanity Blacklist guy my friend because I liked the irony and because it kind of fit in with my general philosophy of trying to make friends of enemies. Since I have no positive or negative modifiers for friends, foes, fans, or freaks, it never makes a difference for me. (For those idly interested, the only bonuses I have are +2 for new users, +1 for long posts [I figure you'd might as well reward effort], and +1 one extra for redundant because I think the