Is the censorship of posts on the Tesla Marketplace too draconian?
I just wanted to voice my thoughts on what I see on the following thread to be a draconian policy to stymie the sharing of ideas and discussion. By it's very nature we are on a public forum where forum members can ostensibly share their ideas on the topic being discussed.
As long as the discussion is polite, civil, respectful, and on topic, IMHO the discussion should be allowed. A moderator's comments on the following thread leads me to believe that going forward, forum members are forbidden to say anything about the pricing of a vehicle offered for sale and it seems unreasonable for the seller, who might not get the feedback they might find useful to price their car appropriately. It also deprived someone buying the car the knowledge of others who might have been through that process recently.
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/44452-2014-Tesla-Model-S-85
[@AnOutsider wrote: Mod Note: A number of posts were removed from this thread. For sale threads are not the place for debates about price or discussions about pricing formulas. Please respect the sellers and keep discussion on topic and between interested parties.]
What makes online forums useful is the ability for multiple forum members to share their thoughts and topics being discussed and back up those thoughts with facts and figures. When such interactions are forbidden and excessively censored there is no longer peer review of forum topics and I feel it is s disservice to forum members who are here to share information and learn.
To demonstrate the extent to which other forums allow such discussions take a look at the following thread on the Mercedes S class forum that resulted after a Mercedes forum member put down Tesla. A few people disagreed and stood up for Tesla to share factual information to set the record straight even though discussion of the Model S was not entirely the topic of the thread or the forum but at the end of that discussion many false assumptions of Tesla and the Model S were corrected and due to the forum moderators of the Mercedes forum being open to discussion there is now less ignorance about Tesla and the Model S. The Mercedes forum mods allowed 12+ pages of discussions about the Tesla Model S without any censorship.
http://mbworld.org/forums/new-s-class-w222/534942-s63-amg-bad-4.html
It is disheartening to think that apparently such a discussion would have been forbidden, censored, and taken down on the TMC forums based on the moderator comment I have quoted above as apparently if someone prices their S60 for $120K, it is no longer acceptable to politely tell them that price is too high.