sidehack (OP)
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Activity: 3374
Merit: 1859
Curmudgeonly hardware guy
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Admittedly I don't get around much. I'm a hardware guy, have always been a hardware guy, got started with bitcoin mining and this forum in 2013 because the hardware was interesting. So I spend most of my time between Hardware and Mining Speculation.
I've noticed lately there's been a lot of "cleanup" on the Hardware forum. Some things are handy, like tidying of massive inline images or dozen-deep nested quotes. That's quite useful.
But then there's a whole lot of removing posts or entire threads going on, much more than I'd seen in the previous five years. Someone mentions a new piece of gear, folks wonder about it, and the next day all traces of discussion are gone. Or within a thread, many posts following the flow of conversation still peripherally related to the subject, or any post even mentioning the existence of altcoins, disappears. Many can attest to removal of posts calling particular un-verified manufacturers into question during discussion of new hardware, but that I believe was mostly in Speculation (though the moderator may have been the same).
I've witnessed several times someone new will ask a hardware question, and a knowledgeable member will provide an answer, and within hours both question and answer will have been deleted without good reason. This discourages active participation and reduces the forum's reputation as a resource for information.
The recent most obvious instance of thread deletion is discussion regarding Bitmain's new water-cooled S9. In the last six days I have seen four threads discussing this machine started and promptly removed. Apparently whoever's in charge there insists that all discussion of the water-cooled S9 be limited to the main S9 thread, already heavy laden with over two years of clutter. This ignores the fact that the watercooled S9 is a completely different machine than a stock S9 - in addition to waterblocks, the physical hashboards appear different and there's more of them. These differences, and a plethora of other facts unique to that machine, were being actively discussed in every deleted thread. The T9 is closer kin to a stock S9 than the watercooled unit, and it gets its own thread, apparently simply by merit of having a different name.
Why is this overmoderation, bordering on censorship, acceptable and allowed to continue?
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