Experiment Complete!

For over 6 months, I've been participating on the forums of The News Tribune, to compare it to The Olympian - both owned by the same company.  My findings:

1.  Conservative majority - the majority of comments come from hardcore conservatives, the ones that float as much hyperbole as possible.

2.  Moderation - comments that are unsavory just disappear in the TNT, whereas the "O" has a need to make a formal announcement, which seems to inflame the issue.

3.  Violation of privacy - it happens in both, stirred up by Conservatives who seem to have a real obsession with "who is who", but most blatant and the one that ties LTEs to forum participants is the same one that does so in The Olympian - our blogger of many monikers.  Just to consider that the person in question followed me (predictably) to the TNT to continue the fray says mountains.

Observation - TNT moderators are no nonsense.  They don't make a public spectacle out of moderation, but just go about their job silently.  They don't take kindly to people that are there to cause trouble.

I decided to share this today in light of 98507's work to install "rating buttons".  Immediately, a reader (anyone can rate, you don't have to subscribe) started to abuse the feature.