A critical note (alternative title: where is my speech freedom?)

Question

The censorship sucks on this site. It feels very NAZI / NSB / Stasi like. Is that how you welcome a new guest? I do understand some moderation, but this is over-polished. What happened to freedom of speech over here? Please discuss this stuff with the team. It's WAY to much.

I wanted to send this message private though couldn't find a way to do that (as a guest)

I like Ubuntu a lot, but stuff like this is starting to give me second thoughts.

....little brother is also watching. (and doesn't mind stepping on a toe)

Answer 1

The presumption with this answer is the editing of this:

• https://askubuntu.com/posts/344312/revisions

The key parts of the FAQ are these quotes:

Be nice.

Civility is required at all times; rudeness will not be tolerated. Treat others with the same respect you’d want them to treat you because we’re all here to learn, together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know, and bring your sense of humor.

and

All contributions are licensed under Creative Commons, and this site is collaboratively edited, like Wikipedia. If you see something that needs improvement, click edit!

Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.

We love clear and succinct questions and answers. Everyone who uses the site are able to edit & submit edits. We tend to hone a question or answer until it is precise and to the point.

This is what has happened here. The editors have tidied & cleaned. The perceived 'argumentative' parts of the question have been dropped in favour of clarity and relevance.

Freedom of speech is not the issue here - you are more than welcome to express a question in any way you feel like. Opinions though do not form good questions and thus everyone edits to ensure the question is fully understood without the dramatic turn-of-phrase.

Answer 2

A Critical Reply to a Critical Note

I can understand that it is frustrating as a new user to see your questions edited. If you stick around long enough on this website you will see that it really is a community and that you can be part of this community.

The rules about quality are very strict (and your question absolutely needed to be edited to meet those standards! No doubt about it!). These rules make the community. The people most active here are really quality-seekers. Now, you might not see that, but if you stick around you will be thankful for this type of edit.

Believe me, I was frustrated to see my brilliant questions being closed when I just started here, but now, with more experience, I would vote to close them myself. :) Try to hang on and you'll see the fun very soon. If you do not see the fun in it, then just feel free to use this as a service without warranty or liability.

Answer 3

The censorship sucks on this site.

We do not do censorship. The users that do edit do that to improve questions and answers so that -others- do no need to read all kinds of junk before getting to the actual question to a problem. That is cleaning your house and not censorship.

What happened to freedom of speech over here?

There is no freedom of speech here. Never was. Never will. This site is for problems related to Ubuntu and strictly that. Freedom of speech would imply you could also discuss things about world war 2 or what hypocrites American politicians are.

As long as the question is about a problem related to Ubuntu, to the point, preferably with the correct extra information related to the problem, and has not been asked before anything goes. Same goes for the answer: it needs to be to the point, correct, not just a link dump. The reward is getting reputation.

Some reading material:

• What kind of behavior is expected of users?
• Why can people edit my posts? How does editing work?

Answer 4

I'm writing this incident-unseen as a general reply. Please edit your question to include some of the problems you've been experiencing and we can address those properly.

---

Why do people think they have a freedom of speech everywhere? You're on a private site, not something owned by your government. You have no rights here. Your access to the site is granted to you by Stack Exchange provided that you play by our rules. It's all in the terms of service.

You are complaining that we're doing something wrong because we're not letting you post whatever you like... Well that's not how we work here and you are wrong to assume we would.

We're here not only to help people with problems but to help the people who invest their time in helping other people. Bad questions and bad answers will be edited, closed and/or removed as we see fit.

We also focus quite specifically on answering support questions. We're not a chat site and we don't take feature petitions or bugs. You can read all about this in our help documents.