Re: Censorship in GreenHybrid
OK I got the info I think I need in order to comment. Well, it's a touchy subject for sure.
My guess is that Jason established "The Market" thread to help finance the running costs of the gh.com website, which is not free.
Let's do a hypothetical, not even considering THIS ITEM or Eric's situation at all, OK?
For Example: anyone who makes a comment disparaging the value of an item offered for sale in The Market could be construed as "doing harm" to the continuing success of the website, which is bad for every member of the site, if you extrapolate that out.
What if, for example, there were 70 people who might have wanted to buy that item before they saw the negative comment? Some of them might reconsider their decision if someone has posted a negative comment about their opinion of the value of an item. Then, say maybe only 40 of the 70 people buy that item after the comment. You see how easily things can potentially go bad, from one simple comment?
This is not an issue at Amazon.com, or Bestbuy.com, or sites which are established huge retail sites, because they sell so many things that one person making a comment about how they feel about the value of something for sale on that site will just get lost in the shuffle.
But at a relatively small site like gh.com, a site which in part relies on items in The Market to keep the site up and going, a comment like that can, at least POTENTIALLY, become a harmful thing.
It's kind of like at E-Bay. People sometimes do not do business with sellers who have negative comments in their Feedback. I personally try to shy away from sellers like that, just to be on the safe side. If someone on E-Bay sold something for $27.99 that can be had at the Mall for $14.99, then someone might leave a "bad value" comment like that in feedback, and that would hurt future sales, more than likely.
So I guess all the above chatter summarizes to this: my opinion is that the Owner of the website needs to at least have the ability to promote sales of items which help to finance the website and not have to worry about members making negative comments which might POTENTIALLY harm the success of the sales, and thus harm the website also. That's different from censorship in my opinion.
Just my little ole' opinion, coming from my status as a MEMBER, not from my status as a Moderator.
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