Located censored posts from dice.com

What luck, the search engines had some of the purged dice.com discussion threads in their caches. The posts have been mirrored here:

Vote with your feet if you object to recent censorship.

Banning and Censorship

This second thread is not actually what I thought it was, but seeing as it was censored too, it seemed worth mirroring. Note that this post deliberately avoids bringing up the initial censored topic in order to avoid being censored itself (because discussing censorship is not officially against the rules). However the moderators view this as dissent and delete it immediately, often followed by threats and account banning.


Some side notes:

Dice.com moderation staff appears to be putting more resources into censoring posts/threads quickly.  Unless a member's own posts have been censored, they are less likely to observe the uncensored posts of others and be aware of the censorship.  Ironically enough, this could result in fewer censorship complaints for Dice to censor.


Another effect of purging dissenting threads quickly is that the posts disappear before search engines are able to crawl them. So it may become more difficult to use search engines to reveal censorship.

Dice.com censorship policy changed in 2011.

It is still possible to find certain discussion posts in 2011 and earlier where censorship complaints were publicly acknowledge by the Dice staff and were not themselves censored.

Here is one such instance:
http://community.dice.com/t5/Customer-Support/Account-suspension/td-p/225388

This alludes to some censorship and account suspensions going on in a deleted post. Although I cannot view the censored posts (which may or may not have violated Dice terms and conditions), this does show that Dice had no moderator policy in place to deny censorship and banning.

http://dicecensorship.blogspot.com/p/dice-moderation-excerpt-1.html


Here is another example:
http://community.dice.com/t5/Tech-Market-Conditions/Dice-Censor-back-at-work-protecting-outsourcers/td-p/201716

This poster speaks about an article which was censored for an unknown reason. However his post regarding the censorship was not censored, and neither was his criticism of Dice.

http://dicecensorship.blogspot.com/p/dice-moderation-excerpt-2.html



More recently in 2011, any thread even hinting at censorship by Dice in the discussion boards is locked/deleted and the posters are warned or banned - regardless of the lack a rule violation.

Here are two from the past week (the links still come up in search engines but are broken due to deletion by Dice).
Banning and Censorship - Dice Discussions
Vote with your feet if you object to recent censorship

This shows a definitive shift in Dice's unpublished censorship policy. All evidence about where and when censorship occurs is deleted. The bottom line is that dice.com is their website, Dice can ban posts which may tarnish the Dice brand or contradict their statements. However this censorship is a disservice to the IT community. Hopefully someone at Dice will realize the importance of open IT community discussions and reverse their mistake.

Two faced dice moderators

"Please remember to keep your discussion polite, thank you."

"There is no problem with you expressing your dissent."

- lesleyp Dice.com moderator

Seems nice enough, right? Here's the thing, though the Dice moderators appear to be nice enough in public, their true nature only shows up in private messages with warnings and termination threats. She posted the above  after censoring countless legitimate dissenting threads throughout the preceding week. Any mention of the fact that censorship occurred is deleted and at a minimum the user receives a warning.

What is troubling is that while Dice is steering the discussions through censorship and threats, their public facing side denies that censorship occurs or pretends the reason is something other than dissent. Before 2011, the moderation was generally constrained to abusive posters, since that time more and more posters are at the receiving end of moderator warnings simply for posting dissenting opinions.

What we think about the new Dice.com

Dice.com Censorship

As a long time Dice.com user, I can say that the dice.com discussion boards were a nice place to discuss technology news and critical topics relevant to technology folks like myself.

Well, those good old days are over. As anyone else currently on the Dice boards can attest to, the administrators have instituted a new censorship policy. When one searches for "Dice Censorship" in the engines, they will find protests going on in the Dice discussion boards, however since these are hosted at Dice, these threads are deleted.

As can still be seen in their message archives, they used to tolerate a great deal of criticism in the interests of an open discussion. However it seems that sometime in 2011, the Dice moderators began implementing an unspoken policy of discouraging or disallowing all threads which were critical of Dice. Many of these posts were not otherwise abusive (and did not actually violate the board's terms and conditions). They were deleted simply because Dice found them disagreeable.

Dice are free to do as they please, even if deleting posts which do not violate their terms is dishonest. Unfortunately however, their new found fondness of discussion censorship brings into question the very integrity of the discussion board for its users. Are the remaining posts and threads a genuine reflection of user opinions? How can our community form a meaningful consensus when not all our posts are present?

So, to all those who've had their voices squelched by the overzealous moderators  over at dice.com, please share your experiences here.

Also, new links to other message boards for technology & employment are welcome.