Is deleting comments a form of censorship?

Question

Fellow Users of Academia.SE,

Recently on academia.SE and meta.academia.SE, I wrote that I was unwilling to have longterm participation in a site for which content -- specifically comments, although my own perspective is more of a blanket one -- which is on-topic for the site are being deleted. My feeling is that this is a mild form of academic censorship. I am very passionately against the encroachment of academic censorship, however mild, and I think the SE model is in some ways a credible threat to making inroads on this.

Although the moderator who deleted my comment apologized very nicely, two moderators found a statement of mine similar to the above "unconstructive", "vacuous" and "distasteful". When I pointed out that comments are treated the way I want them on mathoverflow.net and math.SE, the response was that this site is very different from those sites. [Added: The original comment was "Suffice to state, Math.SE is run far differently than any other SE site, this one included." I believe this comment to be inaccurate, which is why I did not repeat it exactly. If it is seriously intended that experience built-up on math.SE and mathotherflow is somehow a priori inapplicable here, someone should certainly speak to that.] That seems to be true, but also this site is in the "beta phase" because there is not enough involvement, so questions about what future course the site could take seem maximally on-point.

In other words: maybe academics don't like participating in a site which has such a highly gamified / follow-the-rules approach to what is largely volunteer work / networking on their part. This is certainly not a hypothetical question: this was the main tension in the decision of whether to move mathoverflow.net to the SE2.0 model. This was finally done only after many concessions from the SE developers, and the whole thing happened at least a year after the "negotiations" were first started: in the end the SE people agreed to several things which at the beginning they were adamant would not be possible.

Also a colleague of mine tried to start a math-education stack exchange site. I told her that this could be a good idea but also warned her that there were a lot of strange-looking (to us) rules and hoops to jump through, especially at the early stages. She tried it anyway, and the site didn't make it past Area 51: the cultural disconnect between interested math educators and people who like and enforce the SE platform was a little too high. More recently she -- assisted by my PhD student -- made an independent site which is similar to the SE platform but adapted to be less gamified and rigid: this is the Mathematics Teaching Community.

I am very interested to know whether other academics feel that there any cultural mismatch between the mainstream SE model and the goal of getting academics involved in such a question and answer site. Please let me know how you feel about the censorship question above and/or also this broader issue. I would appreciate answers from users who identify themselves with their real name and academic affiliations (past or present), although that is certainly not required.

Added: I remember now that I did once before raise the issue of censorship with respect to comments here. The practice I was talking about was different but, in my opinion, less severe than deletion.

Added on November 27, 2014: A comment of mine was recently deleted without warning or acknowledgment. This comment was pertaining to a question that was unilaterally closed by a moderator. My comment expressed -- wholly civilly -- an opinion about in what circumstances moderator closure was appropriate. It included the information that I had been typing an answer while it was unilaterally closed (another user had just said the same). Thus my comment about how moderator intervention literally wasted my time and nullified my actions on this site was deleted by a moderator. I have made my views on this clear in this question. When moderators delete relevant comments which pertain to them, they participate in the most troubling form of censorship. At the present time I will take a break from this site to reflect on these issues.

Answer 1

First, thanks for raising this issue… though I do not exactly like the choice of words in your title and some of your post, it is an interesting issue of site policy, and something we should indeed discuss as a community.

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I'll add a short answer here, as moderator of two other sites somewhat related to Academia SE (similar clientele): Chemistry SE (which I currently moderate) and French Language & Usage (of which I was a moderator for a year).

The “comment moderation” on both sites is somewhat more strict that it is here, and certainly not like MathOverflow at all. The policy, on both sites, is as follows:

Comments should be used to comment on a question or answer, and in the longer term, all information in these comments should be integrated into posts: integrate new information into the question, improve the existing answers, or provide an expanded point of view as a new answer. The only comments viable in the longer term are short ones, which do not necessarily warrant full new answer.

^{(it's not an actual quote, but since it concerns other sites, I wanted to clearly mark it as such and used the “quote” formatting).}

 

As others have said, there are plenty of places to discuss about academia in general: forums, discussion boards, mailing-lists, chat rooms (including StackExchange's own chat server)… but the SE sites were not designed for that purpose. That's factual. That's what the SO and SE designers tried to avoid.

Now, whether this situation should be changed is a matter of discussion. In my opinion, it shouldn't. We shouldn't have SE sites become mainly discussion-based, because their different nature plays a big part of their success. I love the community here, I chat sometimes on the chat room, but if the site were to turn into something closer to a discussion board, I would not invest time in it any more.

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PS: yes, part of moderation (not only by diamond moderators, but by all power users on SE sites) is censorship in its broader definition. I believe that your question would be more appropriately titled “What should the community's standard censorship/deletion of comments be?”.

Answer 2

I'll repost here as standalone post (not a good practice in general, but we're on Meta!) a comment I left earlier when Pete asked “is the site doing just fine?”.

By all the metrics we have, yes… growing user back, growing number of frequent flyers, very good self-evaluations, me being very happy. Like all metrics, these should be take with a grain of salt (e.g., the last one), but I generally consider this site quite successful — though we should still strive for improvement! In fact, the site has been ready for graduation for a few months now, and is held up (along with a few others) because there's a queue at the “site design” stage.

Answer 3

SE is an information system, which means that information is structured in certain way. It's by nature different from a message board or a link sharing website. Comments are structurally volatile in the way the site work because they don't appear in the search, they cannot be downvoted, and only the top-voted appear at first, regardless of their initial position in the thread.

You can argue that we need some kind of persistent comments, and I will argue that there are plenty of other sites offering that possibility (e.g., reddit). SE is a Q&A website where the point is to have questions answered, in the most understandable way possible (i.e., without having to parse a thread of 20+ unstructured/unformated comments). Now, if enough other users are willing to change the way SE works, then so be it, and let's bring the SE developers on this. As long as the comments are managed the way they currently are, they should be considered as ephemeral.

Also note that, since you mention that I found a statement of [yours] similar to the above "unconstructive", I was referring to this statement of yours:

Deleting this comment because you personally think it is "irrelevant" is a bit offensive. If this happens again I will have to reconsider my activity on this site. (https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/17053/102)

But if you delete my communication while I'm communicating, then it is very disruptive and does not make me want to volunteer my time and expertise on a site like this (which would clearly like to have more involvement from career academics, not less, unless I drastically misapprehend the situation). (https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/a/796/102)

Discussing about what is on topic is on topic. Threatening to withdraw your time and expertise is not constructive.

I also take the problem of censorship very seriously, and I'm trying to be as inclusive as possible. You don't want your content to be removed? Here is a simple trick: don't put in a comment! Update the answer accordingly. If it doesn't fit in the answer, then create the question for which such an answer fits. If no such question can be created on this site, then it's off-topic.

Answer 4

Every site that allows contributions from the community has to remove content occasionally if that content violates the rules of the site. The only difference is how many rules the site has and how strictly they are enforced. Never removing any content from contributors under any circumstance is not a viable strategy, you need the ability to deal with spam, offensive content and abusive behaviour at the very least.

Stack Exchange is a more rigid format than most comparable community-run sites like forums. A significant part of the value of the Q&A format is due to this rigidity and the rather strict rules attached to it, but it is certainly also a source of frustration if you use SE sites for something that does not fit well to the SE model.

The Q&A format is simply not possible without what you consider "censorship". Non-answers for example are routinely deleted, and the sites would be worse if we didn't do that. The attitude towards comments varies a lot between SE sites, MSE and MO are on one extreme of the spectrum here.

But I'd like to use MO as an example, because they actually do a significant amount of what I'd count as "censorship" under your view. They don't remove comments like other SE sites, but they are very strict with non research-level questions and with crank posts. As a mathematics professor you're very unlikely to be censored on MO, but someone posting "too easy" math on MO is very likely to have their contributions deleted quickly.

There is still a lot of room between the extremes in terms of comment deletions, and this is something that each community can discuss and come to their own conclusions and policies. I'm personally very strict in removing any comments that are likely to escalate or that attack other users personally, as a Skeptics moderator where we tend to deal with controversial topics this is simply necessary to keep the peace on the site. And dealing with those often causes collateral damage as the least problematic action is very often to remove all comments on a post. I'm far less strict with unproblematic, but also not that useful comments.

There are many valid postions between the extremes in terms of retaining or deleting comments, but I'd also like to add that I consider the MSE extreme to be harmful to a certain extent. I think this changed somewhat, or maybe it is simply more quiet on MSE now, but there were many very heated discussions on MSE meta including personal attacks in the past that were not deleted or only deleted much later. This lead to a rather hostile atmosphere there which is something I consider much more harmful than the removal of all those comments would have been.

Answer 5

I have always found the active comment deleting policy at many SE sites rubs me the wrong way. I understand that it's the usual policy so I don't usually complain about it, but I do think it's misguided. In particular, I don't like that comments can be deleted with essentially no record that they were ever there and no way for high rep users to evaluate whether the moderator was behaving reasonably.

Part of this may be mathematician culture, where it's natural to think of answers and comments as being at different levels of formality and so comments play a more crucial role. Part of it is also that as an academic I'm used to having more control over my speech than one would have in industry.

One thing MO does, is that when comments are deleted from the main page, a record of them is kept and linked at the meta site (well actually at tea.MO, but a thread on the meta site with an answer for each time this happens would work just as well).

I'd be very curious to hear from anyone who knows about cstheory.SE. My guess would be that since they're academics they have a similar policy to MO on comments, but I'm not sure. If it turns out that all the academic sites (MO, cstheory, the late theoreticalphysics) have a different policy from all the non-academic sites then it might be worth academia considering having a policy environment more similar to the academic sites than the non-academic ones.

Answer 6

As Charles mentions in his answer, comments are not considered the equal of questions and answers. If somebody stumbled across the discussion two weeks from now and marked it as off-topic and recommended deletion, it probably would have been deleted, and that would have been the end of the matter. As I've said before, the goal is preserving the questions and answers for future users. If a comment has served its purpose, it can (and should) be deleted.

Ultimately, it's a matter of utility. While some commentary and feedback related to the question is always useful, off-topic feedback left as comments don't help users. Moreover, your helpful information is going to get lost, since it's not indexed and not searchable. So unless it's in an appropriate venue for the topic, it's going to get lost in the ether. Without the other question, nobody would know to look in the question on excluding authors to see your comments about the best math journals. You can put it there—but why would you want to have it stuck there where it's going to be almost guaranteed to go unobserved?

Answer 7

Ok, so here's the disclaimer: I am not really up-to-date on the discussion at hand so take my answer with a pinch of salt. I am giving my $0.02 to the question: "Is deleting comments a form of censorship?"

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TL;DR:

Yes, it is... just as removal of any spoken/written communication would be censorship.

And, no it is not a deal-breaker for communication exchange. It might not suit everyone but it works in the bigger picture, evidently.

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SE sites have a very specific structure and they attempt to reinforce a community moderation in a very specific manner.

I recall the first time I decided to ask a question on SO I was very frustrated with all the expectations that were put on a new user all of a sudden. It is also very hard to not take immediate and strict moderation personally.

But, if you can pass beyond that SE sites are amazing, in the sense that they connect people that would not, in a million years, be able to find one another and exchange ideas. In my day-to-day work, I am never scared of technical (i.e. programming) problems as I trust in my skills of searching, and reaching out to others with significantly greater expertise in the matter at hand; whether that is the proper use of a library, programming language or algorithm. That's is both a lifesaver at times and a miracle of the modern internet, in its own right.

However, much like all awesome things in life, internet has its downsides. Trolling is one for instance. Another one being people going off-track. There will always be clutter on the interwebs, and without moderation of weeding out things it would be a complete jungle out there. At SE sites, there is community moderation, meaning other users get to tag, retag, edit and even remove questions, answers and comments. It's not a water-proof way of doing things, but it is a valid way of keeping it tidy. If you feel that you have been unjustly treated, you take up your case with others in the community in meta (which is exactly what we are doing right now), and I have yet to meet a moderator that has been utterly and completely unreasonable.

Sometimes the structure imposed on a SE site might hinder the progress of the site, or your own participation in it. A relevant example I can give from my own experience is Sports.SE. I was thrilled when it started, and was very active for a while. Later on I had some disagreements with the way things are done there (with respect to scope, subjectivity and discussions) which I took up on meta, and the community did not have a clear opinion on the matter on way or another. So things were kept as they are, and I just realized that I did not have much to gain in sticking around. I check the site occasionally to see if there is anything that tickles my interest but more often than not I do not spend beyond 15-20 mins a week on Sports.SE.

So the take take-home message: if the community moderation principles do not work for you, then noone is forcing you to participate. It would be sad to lose users based on personal issues however it is also inevitable to some degree when so many people are communicating purely through textual messages (i.e. all other "cues" like body language, intonation etc are missing).

One advice, if I may, is to see to discourse here on SE sites as if you'd have a serious conversation with peers in real life. Nobody likes ever-branching discussions, and have the subject trailing off to other subjects when the matter at hand is yet to be answered.

Again, I am not sure what got you so frustrated but I hope you don't take it personally and choose to stay around for a while longer anyways. :)

Answer 8

"Censorship" is a loaded word. It's not like anyone is stopping you from expressing the thoughts you expressed which were deleted here in some other forum.

But that said, I agree that deletion of comments should be VERY limited. If someone posts a comment that is clearly totally irrelevant to the purpose of the site -- "I make $10,000 a week working at home" or some such -- sure, that should be deleted.

But moderators on many of these StackExchange sites are way more aggressive than that. They talk a lot about "this isn't a discussion board, we are trying to build a database of quality questions and answers that can serve as a reference". Well sorry, but that's never in a million years going to happen.

The whole structure of the site is that questions are posted by random visitors. So there is no pattern or organization to the set of questions. This is not a well-organized FAQ carefully put together by a team of experts. The moderators do not create the questions and do only limited work to organize them.

The rules say that questions should not be general reference. That is, if you can find the answer by searching a dictionary or Wikipedia then you should not post it here.

So we have a stated goal: We are trying to build a database of general reference questions. Then we have a rule: No general reference questions allowed. Hmm.

Questions are then answered by random visitors, not by a team of certified experts. This practically guarantees that there will be contradictory answers, or at least answers that run at tangents to each other. i.e. there will be discussion in some sense.

So again, we have a stated goal: No discussion, no controversial opinions, just straightforward answers. Then we have a format that only makes sense if we expect contradictory answers.

So is this site for posting of alternative answers to questions, i.e. to discussion and debate ... or not?

Answer 9

I have a very hard time taking this seriously.

We have here a user who has only been really active in our community for about two weeks who was upset about comment deletion. He posted as such, a meta thread was made discussing the point; the community had agreed that the comments should have been deleted at a later date instead of immediately, apologies were made, and the matter should have ended.

However, instead of accepting the community's approach, this user posted a long, grandstanding thread about censorship, and started questioning whether the community—which the user had just joined two weeks prior—was well-run. Never mind that, by all measures, this community seems to be doing just fine; never mind that the bit of moderating in question is performed numerous times daily; never mind that the moderators of this site have been pretty willing to engage the community when taking moderator action.

This all seems to be the grandstanding of a new user who is unused to the way our community is run and doesn't like what he is finding. While we are still in beta and the community can change, we've just passed the two year mark; this community has definitely matured significantly since inception. I fail to see any direct, convincing arguments being put forth in favor of change.