A couple of days ago, I posted what turned out to be a
controversial diary. The diary paraphrased an article in Harper's, a magazine with impeccable progressive credentials, since it has published articles both demonstrating that the 2004 election was stolen and, in its latest issue, demanding Bush's impeachment.
I got so heavily troll-rated on this diary that I lost my super-user status, so that I can't even read some of my own comments anymore, ones defending my diary in a way that people who disagreed with it didn't like. The troll-rating system was used to censor my responses to critical posts, thus giving the impression that I was stumped at finding an answer to my critics, and censoring out information and links supporting my position.
The troll rating system is broken, if it prevents diarists from posting responses to comments on their diary.
My critics said several times that the debate I diaried about, whether HIV causes AIDS, has been closed. But this is not true. The only reason the impression exists that this debate has been closed is that the voice of people expressing a dissenting view has been suppressed in the corporate media, and dissenting views are systematically excluded from scientific journals through the peer review process, as my comments were suppressed at dKos with the troll-rating system. (Some readers of the diary gave some of my posts 4's to prevent them from being hidden, but the troll-raters where more zealous than the people countering this abuse of the troll-rating system, so that some of my comments remain hidden.)
The troll-rating system, with its "disappearing" of "objectionable" posts, needs to be fixed in one or both of the following ways:
- Allow a poster whose comment has been given a super-troll rating of less than one to be able to read his or her own post, even if other non-trusted users cannot read it.
- Disallow people from giving super-troll raitings to comments posted by the owner of a diary on his or her own diary. The dKos FAQ states that troll posts are "comments whose only purpose is to disrupt the discussion." It is unlikely that a diarist would want to disrupt a discussion which he himself initiated. (If the diarist is indeed a super-troll, his whole diary should be deleted.)
The present practice of allowing diarists to be super-troll rated in their own diary serves no useful purpose, but presents malevolent trusted users with a very effective way of suppressing free and open debate, something which dKos—as opposed to right-wing blogs—is suposed to be all about.