One of the problems with comment censoring is that there is almost never a explanation of why a comment goes missing? The experience is quite Kafkaesque and unstated. “Your comment has been deleted (or never existed in our system) for reasons that you may not enquirer further about.”

So I created a blog http://censoredcomments.wordpress.com/ where anyone can post censored comments from blogs or news sites. The only requirement is that the comment posters identify the site that censored them. The idea is to create accountability. People should be able to know which sites are the most censored.

What to you think? Is this a good idea?

how close are we to having a close social communism net dictate how and what we should be thinking ??

i discourage strongly all the third-party spam “comment” services which hhappily charges fees to discriminate comments (and thus content) based on the views of the author. Likewise web developers should probably learn to build efficient blogging system to allow peoples not in facebook to comment freely without a third-party service acting as a content federation/censoring agent.

Great post, but i disagree that identity should be the solution and recomment tor to post comments anonymously!

They won’t even let me give a ‘thumbs up’ (or down). I suppose I committed some unforgivable sins, such as urging that the law should regard injuries and deaths resulting from initiation rituals the same way as those resulting from action by noncollegiate thugs, and daring to disagree with Yahoo!’s official coronation of Jennifer Anniston as The Hottest Woman Ever To Have Lived.

At this rate, I wonder how long it will be before independent thinking is regarded as at least a mental disorder if not a crime.

I’m sorry to hear TechCrunch decided to moderate and delete your comments. At present I don’t know of a project that provides the type of scoring I mention in this post. I think it would be an interesting project and even if it weren’t perfect, the increased attention on the issue might alleviate some of the problems.

Is there a project which details if site’s censor commenters? If not, I’d love to start one.

Jacob
P.S. Please don’t censor this comment

Exactly! I wrote this post in part because I was getting frustrated with spending a lot of time crafting comments and then having them disappear. Like you I’ve sometimes pinged the owner of a blog and gotten a comment out of the Bermuda Triangle of Spam but that’s a lot of effort and is simply not repeatable for any length of time.

So you’re right, not only are current comments lost but future comments are also lost because our desire to comment diminishes every time we invest time and effort for nothing. At present it doesn’t seem like there is a comment system that everyone likes. I see a number of problems with a highly-fragmented commenting ecosystem both from a contribution and content perspective.

In short, it feels like there’s still room for some innovation in this area.

There was one very popular Pro Blogging site I used to visit, until one day I posted a comment that I had put a LOT of time into writing. I checked back the next day and saw about 20 new comments- but not mine.

I emailed the blog owner, who said my comment was caught in the spam filter. Then he posted it. This was cool, except that the next time I posted to his blog it happened again.

I didn’t bother emailing him the second time, because it didn’t really matter any more. What’s the use in commenting if my comment doesn’t show up for days after? It doesn’t feel like I’m part of a conversation that way.

Now, I don’t even bother reading his blog, much less posting comments to it. It made me feel as if I wasn’t part of the community there, and also as if his site was so popular he didn’t care about this one reader.

I try to make it a point to ensure everyone’s comments are posted to my site, and also to respond to them. If I don’t have time to respond, or if the comment doesn’t warrant a response, then I’ll at least hit the “like” button on their comment.

Yes. I’m seeing the same types of things with Akismet. And yes, I did run a survey on G+ about this topic. I didn’t get a ton of responses (25 or so) but the vast majority said they either never or sometimes checked the spam queue. It’s a small sample size, but it does match my own instinct on the subject. I think a lot of good content is being lost.

Maybe a lot of bloggers don’t check that SPAM folder very often. Didn’t you run a survey about this on Google+? I’ve stopped logging in (can’t take having to wade through muted posts any more).

But since many of the visitors are not registered on DisQus therefore they do not know how to provide website address there and they do not comment (Most of the visitors are commenting for Backlinks only).

You can check it out at my blog. Just try to comment on one of the post and you will see the site linking at the bottom portion of comment form (Disqus form which is shown).

Moreover if you are using any plugin for Commenting be it Facebook, OpenID, Disqus, etc all they discourages the comment as the commenter has some responsibility while commenting from these ids