Posts moved to the equivalence bashing

[pellicle]

Hi
I got a notification that some of my posts were moved to a thread about equivalence.

Of course you may do as you wish but my posts were not all about equivalence but about such things as coverage, vignetting and light gathering on m43 sensors and examples were with coming lenses. Some of them did discuss equivalence but others did not.

These are now contextually meaningless, and so to be honest I'd just as soon see them deleted.

To me this borders on a censorship which is disappointing. For its not as if my posts are insulting or irrelevant to the discussion.

I often go to length to explain ideas and to supply pictorial explanation so while I can't see this as bashing I accept others may. None the less isolating all these posts is essentially deleting them from the discussion that they were placed in.

I see this is a fraught subject (post moving) and accept that editorial control is both time consuming and vexing.

I also see that without it the thread can "go wild" and deviate. Making editorial decisions is time consuming too, meaning it is often easier to just grab everything that looks off topic and move it into one unsorted bucket.

If this becomes heavy handed from here on in I expect it will simply stiffle discussion and make the place more sterile.

It's your site to prune as you wish, but it's the posters who make it and provide the content. So in a way it's also one site too.

I accept that people may not grasp the points I make and indeed my points may be wrong and in the fullness of discussion I may learn something myself.

Every gardener knows there is a time to prune and a time that pruning will damage the plant.

 

[Amin]

This was not my best day as a moderator. I temp banned some members I shouldn't have and made a pretty rough job of deleting and moving posts. I realize that sometimes I am too heavy-handed. I don't think of any of it as censorship, because I am not a government, and this is not town hall. At the same time, I understand that people take the time and energy to write their thoughts and don't appreciate when those posts are edited, moved, or deleted. And that sometimes I have been too quick to do so.

I'm glad you understand that moderating is not easy and that it too takes time and energy, two things of which I am in very short supply. I take no pleasure in messing with anyone's posts. I'd much rather talk to my kids about their day at school, help them with homework, or go out and take some photos. Every minute I spend on moderating with a lighter touch instead of a heavy one takes away from something else I should be doing. And while you feel that it would have been better to delete the posts than to move them out of context, I know from experience that a lot of members don't feel that way about watching their posts disappear completely.

As for the gardening analogy, I think of this particular scenario more as weed pulling rather than pruning. Weeds can be nice flowers unto themselves, but they can also overrun a nice lawn. One of my motivations for starting this site years ago was that another forum I frequented back then was absolutely overrun by equivalence arguments. We weren't allowed to appreciate the system without just about every thread being confronted with comparisons to other systems, all in the name of "educating" us and halting "misinformation".

So I admit to having a high sensitivity to arguments about equivalence, light gathering, and such. I almost always find both sides of the argument to be somewhat wrong, on the one hand the folks who don't understand the principles, and on the other the folks who make incorrect assumptions about different formats having similar sensor efficiencies (smaller sensors often tending to be more efficient in real life) and failing to see practical aspects such as the implications of different sensor generations simultaneously in prevalent use, how smaller sensors tend to have higher pixel density (and how this affects "reach"), and how smaller formats often have superior body stabilization, which counterbalances some but not all consequences of smaller sensor area.

I would sooner close down the site than to have it replicate some of the other forums I have experienced. I know the site is what it is because of the members, not me, but I also believe that many of the members are here because it is moderated. And I believe that many of the members who appreciate moderation tend to be the ones who don't speak up, don't argue, and simply leave and don't come back when the forums are overrun with arguments.