You people are simply demonstrating that you are not law abiding citizens.
Quote from a post in quora:
No. Quora doesn't have a "secret" censorship service. It has a publicly known group of admins who do their best to enforce policy decisions based on published guidelines. You may disagree with their actions, but they're not a secret, underground, unacknowledged group: see Who are the current site admins of Quora? (I'm one of them. Hi!!!)
Whenever anybody makes editorial decisions, people have tedious arguments over the the semantics of the word "censorship." Whether you call it "censorship" or not, it's true that Quora admins collapse and, in rare cases, delete content.
And if you want to call that censorship, I'm cool with that. I don't really care what it's called. Whatever you call it, it happens.
There's another form of censorship that's much more damaging. It occurs when a government makes it impossible for certain views to be expressed. Whatever you want to call what Quora does, it doesn't do that. If Quora deletes your post, you are free to repost it at the website next door.
But I don't want to dodge the issue. You are quite right that admins hide (collapse) and delete some posts. And you are also right that they sometimes do this for vague reasons: that is, many of their decisions are judgement calls rather than heuristically-based decisions that a program could make as easily as a person.
I wonder if you've ever run a forum site. I've been participating in them for over 30 years (since 1980), and they tend to be run along three lines (with some blurring between them). Each of these systems has pros and cons.
1. Anything goes. A sort of wild-wild west where there are no rules. The pro is complete freedom. The con is that such forums can quickly become filled with or dominated by hate speech (e.g. racist rants), spam, and noise.
2. User-based moderation, which is what Quora would have if it relied only on upvotes and downvotes. The pro is anything goes, as long as you can convince the majority. Another pro is that the majority gets what they want. Cons include a silencing of minority voices and voting blocks that persecute individuals.
3. Admin-based moderations, in which a small group oversees the site, applying an editorial policy, generally based on "vague rules." The pro is that this group can hone a site to comply with a particular vision. It can also overrule the majority, allowing less-popular voices to be heard. The con is that admins have more power than anyone else, and they're not always answerable to any sort of authority.
The good news is, as an Internet user, if you prefer one of these moderation systems over the others, you can find sites that use it.
I say the following as myself, and I'm not speaking for other admins or for Quora (I'm not an employee), and I'm not basing it on insider knowledge. It's just my guess: Quora isn't likely to change from an admin-based system to a simple democracy or an anarchy any time soon. So you may want to think of the way the site is being run as a Force of Nature. By all means, make your opinion known, but don't expect anyone to say, "You're right. We're going to give up admins or what you call 'censorship.'" And I wouldn't expect the rules to turn into simple heuristics.
As for those "vague rules," they're unfortunate but -- in my opinion -- necessary. The problem is that we're dealing with humans, not machines. Humans are nuanced, and one must often use judgement rather than heuristics when deciding human issues. This is what courts have done for centuries, because no one has come up with a better system, aside from killing the witch if she floats and pardoning her if she drowns.
Let's say you want to set up a site in which no one is allowed to insult anyone else. You may not want to do this. You may even think it's a bad idea. But for the sake of argument, say you wanted to do it or were hired to do it. Let's say I offered you a million dollars to set up such a site. What heuristic would you put in place to decide whether a particular sentence was an insult or not?
Wouldn't you have to say "no insults" and then make value judgements? Or you could leave it up to votes and let a liberal (or conservative) majority allow insults on their side but downvote all the ones on the other side.
Quora's foundational "vague" rule is Be Nice Be Respectful. See What is Quora's "Be Nice, Be Respectful" policy? Here's how admins tend to wield it. Someone complains that it was violated. We take a look at it. We then debate it, sometimes for an hour, often for several days. One admin may passionately feel the particular post is a BNBR violation; another admin may passionately disagree. We put a huge amount of thought and energy into each ruling, but we're far from perfect. We're humans.
Because this goes on in private -- and it does because it would be unfair to users if we aired their details in public -- it can seem, on the outside, like admins are making arbitrary decisions. Well, they may be making bad ones (that's not for me to say), but they're anything but arbitrary. The other admins know I've sometimes stubbornly argued a case for thousands of words and for days, holding up the whole process. And I'm not the only one who has done that. One thing you can say for us. We all care deeply about the site and its members. We care about both. (Most of us aren't Quora employees.) We're doing the best we can.
Just replace Quora with bitcointalk, and focus on point 3. And while you're at it, replace admins with admins and moderators. Voila, now you can take that tin-foil hat and throw it in the bin
