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Grex > Coop11 > #160: Scribbling and Expurgating: Is it Effective? | |
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| 25 new of 128 responses total. |
goose
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response 8 of 128:
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Mar 21 06:11 UTC 2000 |
I never realized that scribbling a response didn't totally remove it from the
eyes of the general populus. I think we need the log to check for abuses,
but that it should not be world readable. I'm not comfortable with the system
deciding that sefl-censorship is not good for *me*.
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mdw
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response 9 of 128:
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Mar 21 07:03 UTC 2000 |
Who do you think *should* be able to read such a log? Keep in mind that
even if "scribbled" responses weren't saved *anywhere*, that doesn't
mean the response wasn't seen, or saved, by random people before it was
deleted.
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mary
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response 10 of 128:
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Mar 21 11:44 UTC 2000 |
The time to self-censor is before you say or post something. If folks are
aware of this then they are put in control of everything they make public.
If you allow after-the-fact censorship you'll still be in the position of
never really knowing who is reading what. Truth.
And how would you handle something like this - Jack posts something and
for whatever reason Jill copies it to a file. Jack later comes back and
censors his comments and Jill renters Jack's comments as part of her item
or response. I can see where Jill might even want to do such a thing for
very good reasons. Do you then ask the staff to censor Jill's response?
Or what of the person who comes back months or weeks later and out of
anger decides to delete everything they've ever written, leaving holes and
broken threads throughout long discussions? Now, at least the person
knows such an action is only mildly vindictive as nothing is truly erased
once posted.
Would the staff be expected to release information from a de-permitted
censor log? Sure, but under what circumstances? Would it require legal
action? Would the staff be asked to make the decision whether what was
posted and public then censored was libelous and others had the rights to
see what had been posted and to allow for a response.
There are way more examples of how this could go badly.
The way it stands now all of this is moot. You think before you post and
take responsibility for your actions. But I agree that it would be a good
idea to have the censor command do a better job of warning people of its
limitations.
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gypsi
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response 11 of 128:
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Mar 21 12:07 UTC 2000 |
When people scribble something, they've usually done it for purposes of
rephrasing or because they changed their mind after the fact. If Jill digs
through the log, copies text Jack wrote, and responds to it, it seems rather
silly. When Jack scribbled his post, he was effectively removing it from the
discussion. For Jill to bring the hidden response back into discussion is
kind of weird since Jack hid it for those reasons...he either doesn't feel
that way anymore or doesn't want people to see it since he worded it wrong.
Jack should have worded it right the first time, yes. I agree. But some
people have a hard time getting their point across, or decide a few moments
later that they didn't phrase it well enough to be understood. So, Jill
would just be playing devil's advocate, digging through hidden posts as if
they're a diary, and putting them out in the open for all to see while Jack
has to defend himself against something he had *already* retracted from
discussion.
Example: I write something in my diary that I later decide would be bad if
found. I rip the page out of my diary, tear it up, and throw it away. Little
brother comes into my room, digs through my garbage, tapes the diary entry
together, and puts it on the fridge for Mom to see. Mom grounds me for a
week. Yes, I was wrong for writing something that would be bad if found,
but little brother could have left it alone and ignored his nosy urges.
Make sense? I don't read scribbled posts because I figure that if someone
scribbles something, they don't want people to see it. I guess if people want
to read it, that's their business, but to paste it into a discussion just
seems wrong.
It's like saying, "Look what I found!!! Look what I have!!!" and grinning
like a little brother.
<birdy reads her post over and over again, decides it's just fine the way it
is, and makes it so>
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void
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response 12 of 128:
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Mar 21 13:18 UTC 2000 |
denying people self-censorship is every bit as vile as denying them
freedom of speech. in fact, it *is* denying them an aspect of free
speech.
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goose
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response 13 of 128:
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Mar 21 15:15 UTC 2000 |
That's the way I see it too void. If we have an unscrupulous staff member
poking around the censored file we've got bigger problems. The file should
be reviewed by staff and or board when there's a need. I forget, does Pico
keep track of who did the censoring? If so there's even less of a need forthe
censored file to be there. If I want to go back and get rid of everything
I wrote here that's my perogative and I believe within my rights, but I
understand that people may have downloaded the cf's or many people may have
already read what I posted. I think the worst chance of abuse exsists now
with folks getting a false sense of security. Especially through backtalk,
calling it 'erase'? Hardly.
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mary
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response 14 of 128:
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Mar 21 16:05 UTC 2000 |
Posting to Grex is nothing like writing in a diary. It is public. If
it is posted and anyone reads it it has become part of the discussion.
To think you can call it back or make it private is foolish.
Imagine yourself at a podium, speaking to an audience where listeners
may even be tape recording the contents. You say something, think maybe
it was a bad idea, so you go back to the microphone and say, "Nevermind,
pretend I didn't say that". That's what conferencing is all about.
And if you think spoken word more fleeting than written text, well,
it all depends on what you've said, isn't it.
I'd much rather we encouraged folks to think ahead and be responsible
for their actions. Treat them as adults, more or less. ;-)
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remmers
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response 15 of 128:
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Mar 21 16:08 UTC 2000 |
Re resp: 11 - Posting something in a public forum is not the same
as writing something in a private diary.
Re resp:12 - I don't follow that one. If you make a speech at a town
meeting or write a letter to the editor that gets published, you don't
get to go back and erase your words.
I think we'd be better off without the scribble command, and
cautioning people to take responsibility for what they post and
to think before they type.
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remmers
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response 16 of 128:
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Mar 21 16:10 UTC 2000 |
(Mary's #14 slipped in and said much the same thing as I was trying
to, and said it better as well.)
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janc
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response 17 of 128:
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Mar 21 17:50 UTC 2000 |
Mary articulates well why I think self-censorship is a bad idea. Lots
of forms of speech are irrevocable. Most of them even.
I strongly agree however that allowing people to think they are
censoring themselves when they are not is bad. That means the current
system is bad, but it also means that trying to make 'scribble' really
work is bad, because you can't really do it. Soon after you have posted
something, it will be in lots of people's scrollback buffers, browser
caches and memories. It wouldn't odd at all if someone reposted what
you deleted. It's much better not to foster any illusions about this.
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keesan
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response 18 of 128:
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Mar 21 18:53 UTC 2000 |
Sarah, if Jill responds to something that Jack wrote before he scribbles it,
quoting part of what he wrote, only Jill can scribble her response.
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jep
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response 19 of 128:
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Mar 21 19:18 UTC 2000 |
The current setup seems like the worst way to handle the situation. If
"scribble" doesn't remove text from public view, then the option should
be removed. If it exists, then it should work the way most people will
expect it to work. I'm startled each time I re-discover (through an
item like this) that if I use "scribble" on Grex my remarks are still
readable.
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gypsi
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response 20 of 128:
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Mar 21 21:47 UTC 2000 |
Ditto.
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gelinas
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response 21 of 128:
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Mar 22 03:14 UTC 2000 |
I would expect my scribbling my responses to be permanent. I would expect
the conference's fair witness scribbling my responses to be reversible.
But that's just because that's the way it was somewhere else. This is a
different place, with different norms.
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other
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response 22 of 128:
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Mar 22 07:24 UTC 2000 |
The expurgate command is useful for presenting asnswers to questions which
people may want to figure out for themselves and then check against the
expurgated response, so there is a perfectly legitimate use for expurgate as
it now functions.
Scribble, on the other hand, seems to be worse than useless if it really does
not do what it suggests, and I, for one, think that it should not be offered
as an option (after doing the thinking that this discussion has resulted in).
The point is simply that we should all take the time and make the effort to
consider what we post in any public forum before doing so, and the scribble
command does nothing more than further the false sense of security that
unsuspecting users may already have about computers and the internet.
I find myself frequently using the replace command in gate (the editor I use
in bbs) to correct errors in my posts, and sometimes even to change what I
have written. I recommend it, because once you put it out there, you just
cannot take it back.
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krj
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response 23 of 128:
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Mar 22 17:33 UTC 2000 |
I would hate to see "scribble" go away. I usually use it for quality
control, when I suffer a severe brain fart while trying to post something
and the syntax comes out mangled. Or there is terrible net lag and I
get some sort of editing disaster, and the mangled text escapes and
gets posted -- that happens mostly on M-net, though. So when I
scribble something a corrected version runs as soon as I can in a
subsequent response.
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remmers
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response 24 of 128:
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Mar 22 18:19 UTC 2000 |
Wouldn't "expurgate" be sufficient for that?
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void
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response 25 of 128:
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Mar 23 06:27 UTC 2000 |
the system as it currently works is wrong. people have thought that
scribbling their responses meant that their responses were no longer
visible by anyone. if grex is determined to continue without a command
that does what scribble implies, then scribble needs to be removed
entirely and replace needs to be promoted. (this is the first time
i've ever heard of replace.)
it still doesn't alter the fact that i am firmly convinced that
denying self-censorship is denying an aspect of free speech.
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remmers
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response 26 of 128:
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Mar 23 11:52 UTC 2000 |
I think what Eric is referring to is a command in the gate
editor to replace one piece of text by another. But it only
applies to text that you haven't posted yet.
If by "self-censorship" you mean the right to remove one's
own words from the public record, I disagree quite strongly.
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cmcgee
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response 27 of 128:
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Mar 23 15:23 UTC 2000 |
Hey, if Congress can do it, why can't we? Senators and Representatives can
edit, add, delete, and otherwise pretty up the record, so that if they said
something that might get them in trouble, they can get rid of it. The
Congressional Record is a record of what they might have said, not what they
really said.
So maybe we really should let Grexers have the same opportunity to go back
and edit the record so that they can say, "I never said that! Check my post
to see what I meant to say."
[For those who don't know me well enough to tell, the above is about as
sarcastic as I get. I truly believe that we should not be able to edit a post
after someone has replied to it.]
I would be in favor of a command that allows you to delete your response
entirely, if someone has not entered a response after it. And I wish the
scribble and/or expurgated file was only readable by staff.
While I agree that everyone should be aware of the permanent, public nature
of entering a response on Grex, I would like a command that lets you go back
and "hide" your earlier response so that others could see that you had
responded, but thought better of it. It would look, on the surface, just
like the current scribble. But the difference would be that, in general,
that response could not be read again except by staff.
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scott
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response 28 of 128:
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Mar 23 16:18 UTC 2000 |
It *is* possible for a FW or the author of an item to kill an entire item.
I don't think the killed item goes into any logs. So there is a way to
self-censor, if you don't mind blowing up other people's responses.
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remmers
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response 29 of 128:
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Mar 23 16:32 UTC 2000 |
The author of an item can't kill it after anyone else has
responded to it. An FW can, though.
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orinoco
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response 30 of 128:
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Mar 24 23:48 UTC 2000 |
Re the podium analogy in #14: The way things are is not necessarily the way
things ought to be. Just because one can't self-censor in most forms of
communication, that doesn't mean one shouldn't be able to. It doesn't
necessarily mean one should be able to either. I just don't see that that
argument holds much weight in either direction.
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mary
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response 31 of 128:
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Mar 25 00:43 UTC 2000 |
Just how do you censor something that folks have already read,
heard, seen, copied, recorded, snipped or saved? In some
venues attempting to censor existing text or pictures even
make it more likely the content will be read or viewed.
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albaugh
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response 32 of 128:
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Mar 25 01:15 UTC 2000 |
Technically speaking, given grex not having the source code to picospan, could
the scribble command be made to actually scribble responses? If the answer
is yes, then I'd be willing to put this to a membership vote. Even given the
caveat of someone having made a copy of a posted response, I'm in favor of
the scribble command actually scribbling. If it technically can be done, then
the membership should vote on it.
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