Update: Dice Message Boards taken down.

It's official, the Tech Talk message boards at Dice are shut down.



It's obvious that the IT community message boards never fully aligned with the corporate message Dice was pushing. The discrepancies between official articles reflecting the state of IT and the community posts in the message boards were staggering. It certainly must have been troubling for Dice that their articles were being debunked on their own message boards, which is precisely why they brought in the moderators.




After banning and censoring the most prominent members of the community, even it's leaders, the message boards never recovered. The senseless over-moderation of the community caused it to became stale. Amid continued criticism, instead of apologizing to the community or relaxing their censorship policies, in 2014 Dice has decided to take the Tech Talk message boards down entirely.

Dice.com Censorship Hypocrisy

It seems Dice is willing to highlight the censorship of others.

http://news.dice.com/2012/01/27/twitter-censorship/

"Twitter announced a change towards its censorship policy, and it has sparked both positive and negative response from its users. The change would allow Twitter to censor tweets locally in any particular country, when required by the local law, but keep the tweet accessible in other countries."


It's quite telling that the comment posted in response to this article was itself censored!

A big difference here between Dice and Twitter is that Twitter is censoring users to comply with local laws, whereas Dice.com are censoring users to promote their own corporate interests.

Painting a biased image using censorship

Dice is widely cited for it's claims about the tech industry.

For example: www.pcworld.com/article/229191/computer_science_grads_fielding_multiple_job_offers.html

They are so widely quoted in fact that it is sometimes difficult to find other independent media sources that do not rely on Dice spokespersons. It is because of this reach that it is so important for Dice to paint a balanced and representative view of our industry, we deserve this much. When we come to Dice forums to  exchange our experiences, we expect everyone to be able to participate equally, why are some of us being silenced and banned? Why has Dice resorted to censoring criticism? It only promotes a group think where the only allowed viewpoints are those that aren't overly critical of Dice's representations of the industry.

Dice gets away with publishing information it knows is contested. Yet instead of taking the responsible route and encouraging an open debate, they cut off discussions on the matter, wiping them out of existence.

Dice Inc are a prime example of corporate disregard for society, seeking to promote misleading & shielded corporate messages at the expense of open speech.

Dice hiring discussion board censors

Great opportunity to participate in corporate newspeak and censor dissidents!

Location :Silicon Valley San Francisco, CA 94101

Other Pay :Plus Bonus Opportunity

Employee Type :Full-Time

Industry :Internet - ECommerce

Manages Others :No

Job Type :Media - Journalism - Newspaper

Education :4 Year Degree

Experience :At least 3 year(s)

Travel :Up to 50%

Relocation Covered :No

Post Date :7/6/2012

 Description Dice.com, the leading global career site for technology professionals, has established a new position of Community Manager to develop, manage, and evangelize online discussions and participation in them by Dice users.

Reporting to the Senior Editor of Dice News, this position will appeal to someone with a passion for social media, technology, online communication, blogging, and interacting with a wide range of very smart people.  Our users include professionals in all aspects of tech, from software architects to game developers, big data experts, and operations specialists.

When you become a Dice team member, you join a company that values their loyal and enthusiastic employees by providing them a competitive salary, great benefits, including a 401(k) match, generous paid time off, casual dress, wellness program, fitness club reimbursement, tuition reimbursement, and more.

Keys to success in this position:

• Innovative thinking around content and audience engagement
• Comfort level with cutting edge technology topics and tools
• Understanding of interactions between website users, and best practices in moderating discussions
• Ability to manage remote freelancers and interact with in-house moderators and vendors
• Ability to develop strategies to increase user engagement on Dice

    
In this position you will:

• Take lead in daily oversight and moderation of discussion boards, including management of freelance and staff moderators
• Work with Dice editorial staff to ensure blogger participation in appropriate discussions
• Tracking and reporting
• Work with Marketing, Customer Support, and other departments to develop initiatives aimed at creating new offerings within the discussions and promoting their use
• Participate in discussions to solicit ideas from users and respond to the feedback
• Evangelize communities and discussions both within and outside of Dice
• Act as primary liaison with platform providers and other appropriate vendors
• Develop strategies and tactics to grow community size, activity, and retention
• Participate in editorial planning

 RequirementsMinimum Qualifications:

• College degree in communications, multimedia, or related field
• Minimum of three years experience with online communities, forums, and social media
• Well-rounded understanding of IT industry and technology-based consumer products such as smartphones, tablets, video games, etc.
• Expertise with website discussion and management tools.  Expertise with blogging and tools such as Wordpress preferred
• Experience in tracking and reporting
• Self-motivation and ability to work under deadline pressure
• Strong collaborative, project management, and communication skills
• Ability to travel

Dice is an Equal Opportunity Employer. 

Reference, Background, and Credit Checks Required.

Dice.com censorship continues

Dice continues to silence voices they don't want heard on the Dice.com community site.

This is the face of corporate censorship:

Users frustrated by Dice.com censorship

Dice.com admins have started banning IP addresses in addition to simply terminating accounts. The IP bans are trivial to work around but appear to be intended to block some of us from viewing the message boards in addition to merely posting to them.


Here are some more mirrored posts: one current thread and another older thread.
http://dicecensorship.blogspot.com/p/users-talking-about-dice-censorship.html

In the "old days" it used to be that Dice members only had cause to complain about censored words, as can be seen in the link above. These older posts can still be found on dice, the fact of certain words being censored was not a secret. This word blacklist was often arbitrary, such as when dice discussions blacklisted the word "monkey". However everyone's opinion was generally welcome. Whole threads were rarely ever censored for their content, unless they were very abusive.

That all changed in 2011, now users merely speaking their opinions can incur the wrath of moderators, who send threatening warnings via personal notification. Users who ignore the hostile threats by posting one's opinion anyways (without breaking any forum rules) can result in being banned from Dice.com. Dice are no longer interested in open discussion, which is a shame.

In one of the posts above, walterbyrd suggested that the indeed.com forum may be an alternative place for IT pros to collaborate without censorship. I welcome other suggestions.

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.