In my experience all communities need rules and moderation (automated or human) to be successful. All the best democracies work the same way.

The beauty of the web is that if one has a contrary view, however unreasonable or offensive the tools are there for one to express onerself elsewhere in public.

Community is open source. If too many people feel one community doesn’t cater to them, they can move and create their own community … with their own rules, of course

Did you know (I’m guessing not because it wasn’t mentioned at all) that both communities are rigidly censored and have huge lists of banned and blocked eBay sellers and buyers. These ban lists are completed obstructed from engaging with the communities and their views, worries, and questions never appear on either site.

There is also an extremely close relationship between eBay and TameBay in that TameBay will ban commenters who have been banned from eBay forums, and I personally know some who have been banned from TameBay, without ever having posted comments there, purely because TameBay staff became aware of the ban by eBay.

Such policies are extremely Stalinistic, and you should be careful of praising or promoting sites that claim open community status whilst heavily censoring and gagging dissenting voices.

Ed

Actually it was just 3 minutes 23 seconds of waffle