More censorship 🤐 on DEV - Looking for a new home for my angry accessibility rants, any suggestions?
Tags: discuss, healthydebate, watercooler, webdev
Published: 2021-06-03 20:19:19

**The irony:** This article has been suppressed in the feeds it seems, check out the healthydebate tag, this article doesn't exist in the feed but does in the week. Anyway, I thought that was interesting, given the subject matter. 

Surely the answer would have been to comment that the article was not conducive to good discussion in it's current form (before I had edited it, I would hope it is acceptable now)...not good form when someone is complaining about censorship to then apply any form of further silencing to them.

However I can say that was fair as this was originally written with anger...the irony is it did push the boundaries of the CoC and I can actually agree with the decision. 

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Hi there, I am hoping you can help me!

Recent events have made me realise that my angry rants on accessibility or other important articles I write are likely to get removed on dev.to and given the effort required to write them it isn't something I can afford to happen, nor is it something I can reconcile with. 

For context, I had an article DELETED (an article, not a comment) by the dev team as someone took **offence**...I would share it so you can form your own opinions but then they may just delete this post also! 

If someone manages to find me my new home for writing then I will post it there and link to it here 🤞🙏

I wouldn't care but it was actually an article on a study not an angry rant and I had taken great care to ensure it was balanced and courteous, if anything it was more acceptable than my angry rants and that is why I am now deeply concerned! 

It was also essential to my own project I have been working on for over a year and I need to be able to ask questions on sensitive subjects to further that project.

Instead of sharing that post I would hope that [my comment history](https://dev.to/inhuofficial/comments) and post history is enough for people to see that I am careful with my posts and their subject matter and I take a lot of time to try and help people on here, even on my angry rants!

## Help me find my new home for the important stuff
So does anyone have any good suggestions on platforms that are more suitable for open discussion on difficult topics?

Somewhere that allows for more difficult conversations to be had as the space I work and operate in is contentious and causes knee-jerk reactions from people who don't bother to read things. 

I would like to be able to express myself freely and even have conversations with those people who disagree to further my understanding of their point of view, especially if their viewpoint differs to my own. 

Also if you know whether the site you suggest allows for canonical URLs then please do let me know as that is a big factor for future plans.

## Don't worry, the sh*t posting will continue
For those of you who follow me on here, don't worry the meme posts on breaking the internet will continue, I just won't be as active within the community on any topic that could cause offence.

I will also still be writing more mellow, informative but boring pieces on accessibility, you know another "checklist to accessibility" as that sort of thing hasn't been done 200 times before.

I am hoping they are still interesting enough for you to continue following me, I just apologise that some of the fun will have to be removed to protect myself.

## As a content creator - what can you learn from my mistakes?
I mean, I didn't follow my own advice and that is why I am in this position.

The first golden rule is don't rely on one platform, I made that mistake! If you are writing, publish to multiple platforms, hopefully some of the comments on this article will help you with places to post as well as me.

The second golden rule is make sure your control your subscriber / follower list. I didn't get my site up and running early enough but you should make sure that as a content creator you push people to your own website and they have the opportunity to subscribe there. That way idiots cannot silence you as individuals have control over whether they want to consume your content or not. 

**Learn from my mistakes** and make sure if posting here you also post to your own site and other sites and use the canonical URL to point to your own website article (so you get the benefit of the traffic you generate here, not DEV).

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## Does anyone want to finish a project I was working on for DEV?
I have a WYSIWYG editor project for DEV.to that it would be a waste to not see finished. 

You can find the [article on that here](https://dev.to/inhuofficial/dev-to-markdown-editor-part-deux-massive-improvements-hack-2-continued-5mp)

It would be great if someone wanted to take over that project and turn it into a finished plugin for the site, I have almost completed it and I feel it would benefit the community, I just can't justify the time on it anymore.

Let me know if you want to take it over!

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## No sign off, I just need your help
Not doing my normal sign off, but if you have any good suggestions for sites that match my writing style and subject matter (accessibility and inclusion) then please let me know.

Finally, if you have any good jokes you have recently heard to cheer me up, please share them in the comments or message me with them, I could do with a little bit of silliness as this has really annoyed me and upset me!

## Additional Edit
**written before I had found out they suppressed the article for clarity**

After a couple of helpful comments below (from both sides of the argument) I have made some minor amends as I realised that too much of my frustration was in this article and it was attacking the DEV team unnecessarily. I even feel I should apologise for letting my frustration out.

They do have a difficult job and they are all courteous and polite, it is unfair to direct anger at the team.

I think that highlights the issue I have, deletion does not allow these conversations to happen. Deletion because of **potential offence** is not something that can be accurately policed and results in inconsistent behaviour. Nor is it actually protecting people as these conversations **need** to happen as tech steers so many things in society.

I still need a new home for the important questions and my accessibility rants (at time of writing this as yet again if there was any clarity on where the line is that would allow me to write the rants with less fear of another post disappearing) but I felt it important to clarify my frustration is with deletion for "soft" reasons ("soft" meaning "not easy to define the boundaries"), not with the people on the team.