You should assume I have motivation for linking to everything on this page and will benefit from it somehow. You should assume I am no better then you are and your opinion has just as much weight as mine. You should question everything. You should come up with your own thoughts and opinions and not trust some stupid blogger.

purposeinc: Please, please, please sphinn this article - http://sphinn.com/story/70586 Give it a re-twit also if you could. It would mean a ton to me!!

David emailed me last week about the post being pulled, before he wrote his post. I responded a couple of times. Then he asked me today about his post. Here's what I've emailed back:

Looked at your post. I feel like you’re being kind of mean to Rob, plus you’ve kind of overlooked stuff I took time to explain to you. I’ll give you a few last remarks, in case you’re interested. I’ll also share them with those on Sphinn.

As I said to you last week, we get flooded with “contest” posts. As I said, these have tended to be taken down if they go popular – some don’t because they don’t get noticed, so they’re non-issues. I guess we should add that to the official guidelines. The “Why” is pretty clear – they generally aren’t news articles, and when you’ve got people complaining they want better content on Sphinn, it makes sense to remove them.

For example, if we gave 10 SMX tickets to various blogs, and each of those ran a contest for it, would you or people at Sphinn want to see each of these contests potentially go hot because each of those blogs have a big audience that would get behind sphinning them? I certainly don’t. So it’s not anti-Shoemoney thing.

Now if Shoe had written a post that was about ThinkTank itself – why people should go, what’s happening, etc – then no problem. But contest posts, as I’ve explained, haven’t been gone.

To your post…

“It appears that Danny, according to Danny, was not at the helm at the time, and had no idea about what happened.”

That’s not what I told you, and I’m surprised you’ve written this. You emailed me concerned the post came down. I told you I hadn’t been watching the day-to-day discussion about it but instead Rob Kerry (Rob is Evil Green Monkey) had – a discussion that was raised by various moderators, asking if the post should be kept.

I cc’d Rob on several of these emails. I said that I’d seen some concerns raised about this, that it was Rob’s job to watch over day-to-day issues, and he’d explain it for you if you have more questions. And I think he gave you the explanation about contests.

So when you write:

“Come on! There must be something more to it than that.”

No, there’s not. We’ve tended to pull contest posts, in the same way we’ve tended to pull birthday posts. We’ll update the guidelines. We need to add that about birthday posts, as well.

“But isn’t social media, by its very essence, something where the mob rules?

No, moderators have a role here. This was covered when Sphinn was first launched, has been discussed many times since (both good and bad) and will continue to be discussed. But our view is that moderators do help; that you don’t leave it entirely to the crowd.

As to what Jeremy posted:

“its no secret that a lot of the core sphinn users (or sheep as you call them)  hate hate hate my site and successes. 

Its fine.  Its quickly becoming a community of shit.”

That’s disappointing, Jeremy. Sorry, but you walk into some other community where you’ve participated fairly minimally (24 comments, 70 sphinns), upset that the moderators made a decision over your post, and it’s a community of shit?

As to what John Andrews posted:

EvilGreen – Rob – doesn’t manually set the standards for the site. He does usually make the call to have something removed that becomes an issue brought up by moderators or users. Someone has to make that call, and Rob has done an excellent job with it.

John, if you want to see a list of “deleted” listings so you can be reassured that things aren’t as worrisome as you think, I’d be happy to have you guest moderator for a week or two. Then you tell me after that if you think all the removals of  Leather Chair Furniture” posts or “Used Cars” posts should go up. Seriously – give the word. Come backroom, enjoy the killspam in the morning.

If you want the real check and balance, any post that gets pulled where the community might have issues about it getting yanked inevitably produces a discussion like this. We get called out on the carpet for such decisions, and we should. Sometimes we change how we operate in response. Sometimes we defend the decision and move on.

I originally wrote on my blog:

“It appears that Danny, according to Danny, was not at the helm at the time, and had no idea about what happened.”

Danny Commented Above:

That’s not what I told you, and I’m surprised you’ve written this. You emailed me concerned the post came down. I told you I hadn’t been watching the day-to-day discussion about it but instead Rob Kerry (Rob is Evil Green Monkey) had – a discussion that was raised by various moderators, asking if the post should be kept.

The original e-mail from Danny that I was commenting on says as follows:

Hey David—

 I think there was some debate last night about whether any posts just about contests should be allowed. I was on it late – Rob runs the day to day, so let me loop him in. Just getting up, so he’ll know more than I especially as I’m still waking up :) Hope all’s well!

From that I assumed that Rob was responsible fully for what happened. I stand corrected. :)

Much Love to all,

Peace!

and out!

(I still haven't seen how Shoe's post violated any of the published rules though :))