- I never heard of a company that needs to silence their customers, there must be something seriously wrong with the company to have to do that. - There is plenty of criticism levelled at Josh and how he runs the business at hashtalk, however, the people that are disrespectful and resort to using terms that are accusatory of crimes aren't allowed (it's posted in the rules of the forum). If you do that, you're banned, generally. The hashtalk forums are owned by GAW, so you play by the rules they state when you are there. I don't see a problem with that. If you want to post accusatory stuff you have these forums to do so without being banned.
I strongly disagree with you, my first account with hundreds of posts was shadow banned for an unknown reason but my history lives to show that I've never attacked anyone or said anything disrespectful. I then had to create another account to ask a question in the beginner question, following that I posted only once after Josh implied that an hour of his online store down could be a bigger loss than an hour of Apples Internet sales. See the following link and by all means tell me how I was disrespectful.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9557085
You're talking with 0 experience on the matter.. because of your "social standing" on HT you are immune to Josh shadow ban button, you can be as critical as you want as long as you're not going ballistic.. if he was going to shadow ban any of the top users (you, daffy, pcfan, etc) a riot would ensue... but shadow banning anybody else who is critical (while being constructive) about the company is fair game because it's a private company?
If you go back another couple of page you'll notice someone getting shadow banned for asking Josh if he meant "CNN" when typing "CCN" in a post, this was enough to get him shadow banned.
There is nothing accusatory, disrespectful, defamatory or outside of the forum rules in all the examples I've just provided you.. moderation to the extent that it currently is does nothing other than hurt GAWs reputation and make people think there is something to hide. Shadow banning someone is making a very aggressive statement, it's a slap in the face to that individual with 0 chance for appeal... you have no idea what you have said, Josh obviously won't reply to you and you just lost months of reputation.[/list]