Reply #416: With all due respect, this is your doing.

[Greyhound]

As a relative newcomer (2005), I was initially enamored with DU because of the wide variety of political positions tolerated and, most especially, as the single source for news & opinions gathered from outside the M$M.

Then the Democrats took the legislature. Pelosi took impeachment "off the table" in one of her first acts as the new Speaker and Mr. Dry Powder himself became majority leader of The Senate.

And your preference came through loud and clear. How many waves of mass-banning have we seen since then? How many did we see before that? What positions were most quickly eliminated?

Look at your Mods. Review their posts and positions before they became Moderators and review their arguments for/against various suspensions/bannings since. I remember that when a regular poster with strong opinions was made a Mod, they were relegated to moderating forums and groups unrelated to the positions they so strongly hold. Now we have blatant favoritism shown in both GD: P and GD by the moderators. How many threads have been locked after hundreds of replies and Recs and what posts were deleted and which allowed to remain before the argument was escalated to the point that the whole thread is locked?

There is no longer even the appearance of moderation. Posters that do not subscribe to this administration's plans are forced to parse their words and approach any criticism sideways because their reply will be deleted and they may well be banned at the first excuse, while the pro-administration SVG (small vocal group) is given free reign unless/until their attacks go so far beyond the pale that it is impossible to ignore any longer. Then, they are given multiple suspensions where the others are immediately banned. Well, many of us won't/don't bother any more.

This policy has created at least two other sites and a group of conspirators within the board from this policy blindness, and many of the contributors forced out used to be the among the best posters on this board.

Any of us that want to read AP, Reuters, and Whithouse.gov can go there through a thousand different channels, it is (or was) DU where the other side had a voice. Those voices haven't changed, your reaction to them did.

ETA; And by allowing anonymous negative feedback, (the unrec) greatly facilitated this change. A rec is positive, the unrec negative and feeds the problem. Keeping embarrassing items off the front page could have been accomplished in many other ways.