[Plasma Shield]

[Update] A further email response was sent by Mullenweg to me:

My email was private and not meant for publication, thanks.

Also, negative comments are not censored, read the thread for plenty of negative feedback. Yours, however, seemed like it needed a response and it was so far down the thread and I didn’t get to moderating it for a day or two that you probably wouldn’t have seen it, hence my email. But suggesting that there are only positive comments on the wp.com blog is demonstrably false.

As for spam,

http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2007/04/09/why-wordpresscom-is-virtually-spam-free/

Finally, related links always point to the same blog/author first, and to the exclusion of anything else *if there’s enough related content on the same blog*.

Here was my response:

Please state whether a email is private and whether or not it is can be put on record.

Your response to my comment concerning the censorship is rather strange, I wasn’t aware that WordPress was in the habit of deleting comments from new posts when the comment thread got too long. Neither is the fact that it needed a response an excuse for deleting the actual comment. Considering your reply wasn’t that long, it could easily have been posted in the comments thread. The comment was not approved and was deleted due to the fact that it touched a nerve, not due to any of the reasons you put forth. As for moderating the comments, you obviously got around to it, because several comments that were posted after mine were approved. I also would have seen your reply because it will show up in the “My Comments” section of the dashboard.

“But suggesting that there are only positive comments on the wp.com blog is demonstrably false.”

I don’t remember saying that there are only positive comments on wordpress.com, censorship doesn’t have to be complete. I think what you read was a comment by Engtech. The presence of negative comments can mean that you do not censor valid opinions on the comments thread and it could also mean that you’re smart enough to leave some negative comments in as to not make it obvious you’re censoring the comments.

Now that my comment has been responded to, and the reason you provided for not approving and afterwards deleting my comment is no longer the valid, I’d appreciate if you restore my original comment, and along with your reply if you wish.

I’d like to tell you that I am posting this on my blog, as this does not only concern me, it concerns every blog hosted on wordpress.com.

Assuming that the article on the link that Mullenweg is accurate and objective, although no data was provided on the how much of WordPress is spam, and the blog that was linked isn’t exactly a reliable source, and the studies it links to has no data concerning spam specifically on WordPress. I have no idea how the blogger substantiated his claim that WordPress.com is relatively spam free. I retract my comment stating that a sizable chunk of wordpress was spam, my opinion was due to my experience of visiting blog that referred to my blog and that alot of them that were on wordpress were spam.

An interesting note though, Mullenweg was grasping at straws in trying to find an explanation for deleting my comment. There was a reason he wanted to keep my comment out of public view, probably was because my comment did not shy from talking about out the issue and brought to light an effect the feature will have and it’s ramifications that WordPress did not want it’s users to know.

Hmm, I wonder if WordPress has done this with anyone else. E.g. When a blogger posts a controversial post, their comment gets removed and they are taken to the side with an email and WordPress tries to resolve and/or attempt to confused the blogger into thinking it isn’t an issue behind its users’ backs.

Or maybe I’m overreacting and I need coffee. Nice to see my blog hasn’t been deleted though.

Edit: Huh, in checking the timestamps of the first email Mullenweg sent me and when I first posted about the “Possibly Related” issue. His email was sent several hours after my post about the censorship was published. Huh, I wonder if an email would have been sent at all had I not wrote a post about it… So the comment was deleted because it needed a response and a response was coming? Taking into account the length of the response, what seems more likely is that the response came because I wrote a post about the comment being deleted.

_________________________________________________________________________________

I wrote a post about one of my comments that were (very)slow to be approved on a WordPress.com news post. Titled: WordPress Censorship? The comment has since been deleted but a staff member has responded to my comment in an email to me:

Please don’t accuse me of lying.

“The goal is to essentially advertise the wordpress network.”

The goal is to connect bloggers who don’t know they’re not connected.

“What you want to do is create an irrigation system where the traffic leaks from the popular blogs to the lesser know blogs, to increase the chance of a reader reading a wordpress blog on each visit.”

The majority of our blogs are not “popular.” It’s contextual, not a funnel.

“sneaking links in their posts that look like they’re endorsed.”

Since we added “automatically generated” no one has been confused about authorship of the links.

“You guys know a sizable chuck of wordpress is spam”

WTF? Take a stroll around Blogspot some time and you’ll see a “sizable chuck.”

“Bloggers who don’t want this feature to enable, and didn’t give permission for the feature to be enabled to have waste time in turning it off.”

It’s a single checkbox.

Relevancy of the links is something that has been steadily improving as we get more data and can measure effectiveness.

—
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://automattic.com

First the email doesn’t mention the censorship, which no doubt Mullenweg knows about, and knows it is an issue because a click on my name in the comment takes him to my blog, with the post concerning the censorship, and no doubt which he did, to get an idea of who I am and to take a look at my blog. (lol, that was one big sentence.)

In addressing his comments concerning my comments(lol), I’d like to mention that it’s nice to see that a staff member followed up on my comment and didn’t just (delete it? and)ignore it. Although not censoring my comment and replying in the post that I commented on would be a better way to do it. I still don’t know why the comment was deleted, it was hardly inflammatory or insulting, and I didn’t even say “fuck” once.

“The goal is to connect bloggers who don’t know they’re not connected.”

When did we agree to the rather communist notion that all bloggers should be connected to everyone else else as default, not as a result of posting, networking and making an effort on their blog?

“Please don’t accuse me of lying.”

Hmm, I assumed that you were aware of the actual function that the feature will take, early on and afterwards. That the the feature is essentially a search for same/similar keywords and/or tags and then a dump of the data on the relevant page, will not benefit all Bloggers as you claim or rather allude to.

I thought you were lying because I thought you knew that a feature such as this if successful, it will take viewers away from individual blogs, and distribute the traffic across the WordPress network. It will be an attempt to remove emphasis on the individuality of blogger and more on the WordPress network as a whole.

Imagine someone reading a post on a topic they find interesting, if the reader checks out the other posts written by the blogger, it increases the chance for the blogger for returning traffic. However, not wordpress as a whole because if the blogger gets enough traffic they tend to move on to host their own blog, and because the reader might get bored with the blogger and move on, the “possibly related” feature increases the chance that the reader will keep reading a WordPress blog, on a topic they’re interested in, but will in effect divert the reader’s attention on the individual blog they’re reading. In effect, the traffic and interest of that person would dilute across multiple blogs due to the generated links, and the individual blogger becomes lost in the cloud.

Further implications may be that, people will be in effect become locked to the WordPress network, due to their traffic becoming in-passing traffic rather than returning traffic, and they if they wish to retain that traffic, they only get that passing traffic as long as they’re on the WordPress network.

Matt, being someone who is intelligent enough to create the WordPress.com as a platform and keep it running, against alot of opposition, it’s pretty likely that you understood this and that the feature is to keep people reading a WordPress blog, instead of reading other posts by the blogger who’s blog they’re on. Sacrifice the individual for the greater good, I’m going to be dramatic here and compare it to communism.

The majority of our blogs are not “popular.” It’s contextual, not a funnel.

It is regardless of what percentage of all the blogs on the network are popular, but rather the level of popularity of the popular blogs on wordpress, the amount of traffic going from blogs such as Internet Duct Tape, Scobleizer and Lorelle, will be almost infinitely more than the traffic that Possibly Related will bring in for them. This is indeed a tunnel, not a perfect one, but a tunnel never the less.

“WTF? Take a stroll around Blogspot some time and you’ll see a “sizable chuck.”

Clearly, the spam on Blogger has a dispersional effect on spam on WordPress, and as such, the level of spam on blogger is inversely proportional to the amount of spam on wordpress. Clearly, if Blogger has lots of spam, WordPress doesn’t have any.

“It’s a single checkbox.”

That people didn’t have to un-check. So you’re saying that’s not alot of effort. How much more effort would have made it bad? We’re on the internet here. All we do is click and type.

“Relevancy of the links is something that has been steadily improving as we get more data and can measure effectiveness.”

The relevance is only a part of the problem, the other part, the part that you’re less willing to talk about, is that you inserted the feature into every single blog on the network without warning or asking the users, people who are representative of the users what they thought about it, and that the generated links were not made obviously to be automatically generated, which now has been changed, but it implied endorsement and recommendation.

The possibly related feature in it self, is not a bad feature. What is bad is that, due to it’s intrusiveness, it should have been an opt-in and not opt-out, or atleast bloggers should have been notified before the feature was put into place.

Like I mentioned above, the feature essentially trades recurring traffic for individual bloggers, for traffic on the WordPress network. That WordPress, by using the Opt-out system, wants everyone to use this feature, wants and tried to sort-of force popular blogs to be the workhorses and fuel traffic for the rest of the network, and increasing the chance of themselves losing traffic as a result. All this done with semi-permission, which is to say, manipulated permission. This, although people may not have noticed, is the main problem. The current mentality of WordPress that it can sneak invasive features under blogger’s noses, and maybe the desire to grow WordPress at the expense of individual bloggers.

That said, some of this can be understandable. Above all, WordPress is free, so allowances can be made. WordPress.com is a useful, functional, efficient and great staging ground for aspiring bloggers, and the staff knows that the majority of people who become successful on wordpress will probably go on to host their own website due to the extra customization and feature they can have on a self hosted site, it’s a little bit sad to see WordPress try to kind-of take advantage of the aspiring bloggers who have become successful, who they think are on their way out of WordPress.

And I really hope WordPress.com stops censoring valid comments just because they present WordPress.com in a negative light, or atleast change the “comments” title to “voluntary positive reinforcement thread”.

More issue were rather by other bloggers so check out the previous post with links on this matter.

Plasma Shield >WordPress.com Censorship?