The COW groans
A little issue is brewing in various forums and mailing list regarding Creative COW’s moderation policies. The COW has always been pretty upfront that it moderates posts. Tim Wilson celebrated as much in a 12th anniversary congratulatory piece.
Today, this seems head-slappingly obvious. Every single significant online community, including the few, small email-based communities that remain meaningful, every single one of them is moderated. Zero exceptions. Forum members across our industry even want to be moderators themselves. THAT’s why it seems obvious now.
Yet The Lindebooms came under personal attack for years, and sometimes still do, for a practice now virtually universal in our industry, and in the hundreds of thousands of forums across the web that have been founded since Ron & Kathlyn started theirs.
By the way, it’s not that nothing off-topic is ever allowed. Off-topic conversations are sometimes critical for keeping the community together–as long as they don’t tear the community apart.
Please note that the following intends no disrespect whatever. But it’s worth noting that one of the longest and strongest holdouts to moderation was our dear friends at the Avid-L, some of whom are also leaders in The COW. “The L” came to an acrimonious split in 2005 over the lack of moderation. The core of that group in its new incarnation moderates both its membership and topics.
Again, no disrespect intended. I’m just saying that moderation works. The Lindebooms started it in our industry. Others have followed.
I look back on all of this and remember what they say: history is written by the victors. Well there you go.
Understood. But that’s not the whole story. Avoiding flames and way off topic posts is laudable. The COW goes much further, disallowing posts that mention competing sites. A COW user can’t say to another, “The answer to your question can be found at this site…”
That’s too bad. Ron, Kathlyn, and Tim should be a little more secure than that. In the age of Google, eventually the user will find that answer anyway. Would they rather Google be that user’s first option? The COW is big. It’s successful, and it can afford to allow the free flow of information — or eventually it will become irrelevant.
Most troubling is the extremely misleading error message (pictured above) one receives when mentioning the unmentionables like DigitalProductionBuzz, Total Training, or Pixelcorps. Would you trust a site that isn’t totally upfront about its moderation policies?
Moderation works, but censoring the free flow of valid information is a poor strategy. Lots more on this at GeneralSpecialist.
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11 Responses to “The COW groans”
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They have now blocked out 2,500 people in the broadcasting business by IP-blocking our IP addresses. And all this for discussing it at my private blog (not even in their forums.)
This most surprising element of this behavior is that they don’t have to behave this way. The Creative COW brand is strong and secure. All they would have to do is simply request that people don’t post external links to the COW, and warn them that repeated violations will not be tolerated.
If the COW allowed external posts on an honor system it would strengthen the brand.
You’re right about them not having to behave this way. Their brand may be secure, but a financial pinch might be inducing some paranoia (or, as some have suggested at Jonas’ site, a mental disorder).
It seems really out of step with this era of free sharing of information.
I don’t think it has anything to do with mental competence. It’s a business decision, and motive is really unimportant.
I had a major blowout with this guy about a year ago. I posted a question in the AE forum that was subsequently moved to the beginner AE forum without notice (a serious question, from an 8 year AE vet). Not that big a deal. So I re-posted, not knowing what happened, remarking on how my post was zapped… you should have seen the personal flame he sends me. “You don’t tell me where and how I move posts on my board… yadda, yadda, yadda”
Really left a bad taste in my mouth, haven’t been back since.
Last time I looked, their top banner said “Number One with Media Professionals”, not Media Hobbyists. Most pros who use the web to gather information or solve problems have several favorite sites they frequently look at, not just one. There is no good business sense in trying to hide other sites from users. This is a situation where small minds breed paranoid behaviors.
Weird that Ron and Kathlyn don’t even want to address the issue. Tim Wilson says in his announcement “it might take me a while to respond”. Why not just say “I have to check with Ron before saying anything” I don’t know what the Lindebooms are doing that prevents them from addressing this issue themselves. I hope for their sake it is something lucrative.
Before turning this into more than it is, understand that COW team is likely changing the terms of service, documenting that change, and looking for an acceptable way to spin it for current users and advertisers.
It will take time. Don’t expect any reversal of policy. The COW has always been an extremely sponsor-friendly environment. That won’t change. There are no professional journalists in the leadership. It’s not about getting it right, it’s about making advertisers happy. Totally legal, and ethical provided policies are clearly stated. (Currently those policies are not.)
The COW’s a good place for a quick answer, but pretty useless for critical evaluations.
Well, I am emailing links to this article on the generalist blog to ALL of the Cow’s sponsors and letting them know that I will not be using any of their services as long as they support the Cow’s practices by continued advertising. I urge others to do the same.
I just want to express my sincere empathy with you, over this matter. It seems that CreativeCow.net, and especially Ron Lindeboom, the owner, is grossly nasty to their forum members.
He closed my account without so much as a warning (well, AFTER closing it he wrote me a vague e-mail), but I can tell you that the trigger was probably my asking bloggers who own the new XDCam EX about the audio frequency response. CreativeCow must have been given orders from Sony to hush me up because of my exposing the awful audio on the HVR-V1U last year.
You can read MY beef with CreativeCow here:
http://members.tripod.com/JapanRadio/
Good riddance to the Cow. Some of those people (not all) are not only impolite, they are downright technically WRONG and spreading false information.
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