It’s Discouraging To Think How Many People Are Shocked by Honesty and How Few by Deceit

 

I embarked on this personal project about Datalounge a few months ago and have worked on it off and on for a while, but over the last few weeks, have been asking myself what, exactly, the point of all this is. While I know this is going to sound like a tin-foil hat kind of thing to say, I believe there's something going on behind the scenes that would likely explain the decline of the forum, yet we are, of course, never going to know what it is.

Plainly put, Datalounge is awash in bigots, and there is no moderation to speak of, allowing misinformation, propaganda, trolling, and hate speech to flourish. In the past, certain words would be blocked from use completely; these days, the only word that is blocked is a troll's real name. The owners of Datalounge aren't doing even the bare minimum of moderation, and the site has turned into a veritable pit.

To illustrate, I spent about 15 minutes looking for examples of the kind of everyday hate speech found on DL, and quickly came up with over a dozen:

Sometimes these trolls get a redtag, but it's very rare. For example, here is one particularly bad troll. Note the date of 30 September 2022:

This troll, however, did not get banned and redtagged until at least April of 2023, meaning the troll was allowed free reign to post for several months, at the very least. Note the date of 18 April 2023 on the post below, meaning Troll #6045 was posting for at least seven months between the post above and this one, written about Ralph Yarl, the teen who was shot by a homeowner when the teen went to the wrong house to pick up his brothers:

Further, if you're not a member of Datalounge and not logged in, you won't see a redtag at all, or any indication that the post had been moderated. Here's what the above post looks like when you're logged out:

You can test for yourself: the thread is here, and when it inevitably gets deleted, you can find the archive here. Look at it both when you're logged in and when you're logged out.

This means that any moderation DL does is only for members; the general public reading the thread will see the slurs, misinformation, and troll posts as originally posted. 

DL is only using an ineffective, cosmetic form of moderation to fool their own members.

Another example: Datalounge also used to block links to particularly grotesque websites, but that disappeared years ago, about the same time the word filters disappeared. Now, there are two sites they supposedly "ban," The Independent UK and the Daily Mail. However, all posted links to both of those "banned" websites still work. All DL does is insert an automatic text in the post that says, in a roundabout way, "don't click on this link," but the link is still viable. 

Since DL did used to ban links -- and in fact banned links to CNN for a while, supposedly for technical reasons -- it's almost certain that they could block these links if they wanted to, but have chosen not to. Again, they have chosen a cosmetic "solution" of making it look like the link is banned, but it is not.

There's one other thing I would like to note about Datalounge which, on the surface, may not seem related, but I believe it is: They apparently still host advertising for companies that went out of business years ago. As I was doing research for this blog, I discovered people claiming that on some browsers, ads for a company that went out of business years ago were still showing up, apparently having been hard-coded into the website. (The threads where this was mentioned were deleted, of course, but there's an old mention of it here, archived here. That thread is worth reading to see how users were reacting to the fact that, in 2021, during Primetime, the lack of trolls was noticeable. Note however, that as of the end of 2022, it became obvious that the trolls were now paying members.)

I did a little investigating and found that it was true, on the Chrome browser, RealJock ads were still hardcoded into Datalounge as of April 2023, though the company went out of business in 2021.

The point in all this is that clearly, the people who run Datalounge do not care about its public image, nor do they want or even need advertising dollars.

This seems odd to me, given that at least two of the owners of Datalounge are very publicly liberal, having co-authored books about how bad George W. Bush and Trump had been as presidents, appeared in social diaries at liberal events, and publicly endorsed liberal political candidates. 

Further, the only people who work at Mediapolis are the four owners. There are no employees who could be making these mistakes or decisions, it's only the owners who are behind Datalounge and how it operates.

After the dotcom crash of 2000–2001 and the events of 9/11, [the four owners of] Mediapolis took the decidedly un-billionaire-like decision to scale the company down from seventeen employees to just the four of them.

This information is public, but I'm not going to link to it or name any of the company's four owners.

All I'm going to say about any of this is that I personally cannot think of any good explanation for what's going on at Datalounge. The situation has gone far beyond incompetence and neglect, and there's almost no chance that the owners are not aware of the content on the board. They do not seem to be the kind of people who would allow a forum to turn into a haven for the types of trolls that abound, yet that's exactly what they've done.

I have an old but good example of this right here. This is a screen grab of two replies from someone who had posted as an official Moderator account several years ago. It's from 2018, when we were allowed to put as many people on Ignore as we wanted, which is why they were ignored user #350. (Archived copy. Second thread here, archived copy here.)

Look at the last reply in that Beto O'Rourke thread. That was from a Moderator, talking about a troll infestation. When I saw that reply, I got curious and used ignore-dar on that user, the Moderator. I looked at their other replies, and what I found was this:

Does that sound like someone who is just fine with the white supremacists on Datalounge? No, it absolutely does not, so why is that person, a moderator, ignoring and allowing so much racist content on the forum?

This is what I cannot understand, and why I think that it's likely that my entire project here was simply tilting at windmills. There's no explanation for any of this that anyone is ever going to get. 

I'm sure the owners know why this is allowed, but for the life of me, I cannot come up with even one explanation that makes sense. They're not bigots themselves, that much is obvious. They can't be allowing all the trolling just for the money, because there's no real advertising income to be had; they're using some of their advertising space right now for a company that went out of business and cannot possibly have paid them anything for over two years at this point. Their subscription costs are quite low, and as anyone who visits the site during Primetime lockdowns can tell you, there can't be that many paid members anyway. The forum is not such an important source of information that they're leaving it up for informative reasons; in fact, they recently deleted almost everything that was posted before the year 2021. There are no archives.

You'll have noticed that a bunch of posts on this blog went live today, 2 June 2023. That was me clearing out drafts of posts I had been working on. I stopped gathering information a few weeks back when I did a little experiment that used the ignore function and inadvertently discovered a big troll account pulling a months-long sympathy ploy. Others had pointed it out many months ago, yet they got flagged and grayed out, insulted, and even one death threat, just for trying to warn people. Compounding the situation was an alleged expert with scientific knowledge joining in on the thread, but posting incorrect information, making unverified claims, as well as claiming to be located in a large U.S. city, yet using English/Canadian spellings. After 15 long posts over the course of several months, nobody noticed. 

When I started this project, I was convinced Dataloungers simply did not understand what trolling was, that they were not exposed to it enough to recognize it when it happened, and that maybe I could help. After seeing the above thread, I have decided that Dataloungers are incapable and unwilling to recognize trolling, even when they see it first-hand. They can be spoon-fed examples of trolling and yet refuse to believe it, and for no reason other than they simply do not want to. Datalounge has selected for that kind of user.

Between the inexplicable decision of management to allow Datalounge to become a hate speech and misinformation clearinghouse, and the fact that so many Dataloungers who remain on the board are fine with it, even encouraging of it, I've decided that the work I did on this project was mostly of no use. I'm not going to delete it, but I am certain, at this point, that Datalounge was always beyond help, and I simply did not realize it until I took a look under the surface.