Today I noticed that a thread with strong criticism of the company behind the Envision Glasses disappeared from the front page, and after checking my own comment history, I noticed that my own comments to that thread were gone too, meaning that the thread itself was likely deleted or hidden from public view without any kind of explanation whatsoever.
I find this quite concerning for two reasons, with the first being the potential practice of censorship and the second being the total lack of moderator transparency that is inconsistent with prior cases, and this isn't even the first time I noticed this lack of transparency recently. Therefore I am posting this to inform that, from now on, I will be actively archiving every thread that I post or comment to on this site, starting from this one, to shame the moderation on other social media sites if my current suspicion of censorship becomes hard to deny, as well as to ensure that the Internet does not forget.
If anyone else wants to contribute to this effort, any public web page can be archived by the Wayback Machine, just look for the last button on that site whose label should read Save Page, move to the previous text field, enter the URL to the page whose contents must be archived,, activate the Save Page button, and then wait until the Internet Archive takes the snapshot, at which point it will display the URL to the archived content that you can save yourself for posterity.
Comments
fare criticism
Hope this doesn't become a patern.
Noticed some of my comments have vanished too
Just to give benefit of the doubt, I wonder if there are back end issues.
It could also be that we've just become such royal pains in the rear that Michael and team have given up on trying to stop us living our Brat 24 summer and are now dusting away our nonsense.
In the case of any conspiracy, it's important to look at the effect and what value it might have to individuals involved. In this case, I'm not seeing a line drawn.
Stay paranoid though. They are talking about you.
Re: Noticed some of my comments have vanished too
For starters I'm talking about whole threads disappearing, not just random comments, and secondly I'm merely communicating my suspicion and informing that I will be collecting potential evidence from now on, not really accusing anyone of anything.
This is also not about paranoia since it's not even about me in particular, it's just an issue that I began noticing recently and is inconsistent with prior moderation behavior so I decided to start taking notes and encourage everyone else to do the same, while at the same time providing moderation with the opportunity to explain what's happening and restore transparency if they so wish.
Finally I find it hard to believe that these observations would be in any way related to back-end issues since the nuked threads have not reappeared for quite some time and they seem to be selectively disappearing out of view, which isn't easy to explain by any kind of technical glitch, but you can have a try if you wish since you are presenting the possibility as reasonable.
Fair points
Hopefully the mods can chime in. I still fail to see why threads would be actively removed.
I think your plan is a good one. Personally I think there is a lot on here that could be pruned and summarised for the sake of easier parsing by visitors—we do tend to ramble. Though that is a diferent matter.
Mods? Could you clarify, please?