Went to the doctor yesterday, going to get an MRI soon. Hope for the best.

Anyway, there has long (over two years, actually) been an active and heated discussion about Digg’s bury brigade, which is seen more as a demonym for a large and disparate group of Digg users who are united only by their fondness for organized "burying" (downmodding) of recently-posted URLs based on their different agendas or impulses.

Of course, back last year, accusations of organized mass downmodding of posts (which is seen as a user-syndicalist malpractice that severly impugns the movement of thought on such websites as Digg or Reddit) were flung between fans of politicians, such as Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama, and other such politicians; in the worst cases, such accusations were passionately slung against allegedly-right-wing covert operatives-for-pay (coming from the Alex Jones fandom, such operatives may not necessarily be government-employed, but employed by right-wing political action committees, think tanks, and corporate rights organizations, or just egged on to action by plain-old webforums for militant keyboard warriors).

But I’ve seen at least one suggestion that social news rating sites like Digg should, in the future, repeal the bury function for stories; instead, if a story is not palatable to a steady amount of user traffic to the post and upmodding the post, then it should be rescinded into the background.

But what about user comments on the Digg posts? Should they be buried or downmodded for whatever reason the downmodding user (or user group) may possess?

This issue has come up at other news forums like the Netherlands-based OSNews.com, where the posting of stories is heavily regulated/vetted and comment modding is only recommended under certain circumstances (unless they’ve changed since I last looked at the comment policies on the site, downmodding of comments based upon "disagreement with the comment" isn’t permitted). However, downmodding is still permitted for other circumstances, and fierce arguments between users due to one of them downmodding the other have often erupted into long threads of passionate commentary.

So downmodding is seen as a user malpractice based, ultimately, upon mental impulse, and nobody likes being downmodded or "buried" for their own commentary (unless they’re the "you know I’m telling the truth, so mod me down to prove me right and make me a hero" masochist type), but they’d just as gladly and passionately bury someone else (pick one: "lame", "spam", "troll", "boring", "inaccurate", "disagrees, compromises, belittles, conflicts or compromises with my agenda or beliefs or my faith in such").

I think that the usage of "wu wei" as far as marking disagreement with a post or a comment is concerned may help solve this problem. If we don’t like it, we don’t touch it; if we like it, we upmod the hell out of it.

But then how do we bring this idea of wu wei to the wiki, of all places?

Wikis usually involve editing/revision or deletion of sections, sentences or whole articles that are disagreeable to us, the editors, in whatever fashion it may assume. Of course, the editors of Anarchopedia, true to the pertinent ideology, are trying to bring a sense of wu wei to their own wiki (as opposed to the reasonably bureaucratic and self-censoring nature of Wikipedia), but realizing a wiki way that runs counter to the Wikipedia tendency is turning out to be an exercise in voluntary subjection to the sort of actions and commentary which are actively discouraged on Wikipedia and most other, smaller wikis.

Also, I’m fairly certain that standards for realizing "wu wei" like that proposed above have been placed into any wiki, even Anarchopedia. If it were more committed to freedom of speech, free movement of the same and non-censorship, I think that Anarchopedia should install modules that could retain "undesirable posts" and promote ones which are more relevant and identifiable to the linking pages which intend to direct the user to that particular information provided by the more relevant article.

I dunno, it just needs some more imagination. But maybe the process of "wu wei on the web" needs further thinking and rethinking in order to preserve freedom of speech and free movement of speech, no matter how much we may disagree with, or feel offended and disgusted by it.