Freedom of press is absolute, or is it?

Day 562, 02:04 • Published in Sweden Sweden • by Kape

I'm sure most of you have heard that a lot of people are getting banned because of their articles and several articles are beeing deleted or moved to the forum under Open Letters. Most of them are probably breaking the rules but some of them claim to be victims of punishment for beeing critical to the game, persons behind it or other citizens/nations.


The end of critisism is close?
I'm know that there are several people considering to create a newspapers outside of Erepublik where they are able to post their articles. We already have a lot of forums outside the game in order to create a society for a nation, an alliance, a company, a party and so on but soon we will have open newspapers outside of Erepublik also and the articles will only contain links to these external newspapers.

So will this be the end of "Freedom of press is absolute" or what?
I don't think so but we will probably need to get used to reading a lot of articles in different formats and locations than those we are used to in www.erepublik.com. That's still not a big issue to me, as long as there is short presentation and a link in the articles I will read those. I would however prefer to keep reading the news in erepublik...


Community- or feature based?
The thing I'm concerned about is that admins are loosing their grip of even more social parts of the game every day. Is the forum and messaging to be next and will erepublik soon become decreased to just a "clicking site" with external sites, forums, newspapers, stock markets, wiki and messaging services? I hope not, but in order for that not to happen they will need to develop better ways for us to communicate with/to each others without beeing afraid of getting our work deleted/moved but still free from racism, extremism, trolling, flaming and pornography.

I played another online game for several years where the team behind it had a game that was full of bugs and lacking a lot of features and they where aware of that. Instead they decided to focus on the community/messaging with private groups, nations, subscriptions, voting features and by that kept the players within their site. This made the game slowly grow and when they finally made their technology leap they had a huge growth in users AND a controlled enviroment where they could interact. That game now have +950k users and some of them are "two clickers" while others spend +8 hours per day on the site.


The future?
I suggest that the team behind Erepublik either make something drastic about media, messaging and forum or start considering those parts to be integrated to external service providers that focus on taking control over the society and providing us the tools we need.

If we are to keep newspapers within the game, perhaps we shoold consider them "personal" and have a penalty where the user is only banned from the media/forum and not being able to create a new newspaper under an organization. In order to solve the need for govermental, nation and group newspapers those will have to be connected to a "role". That would need erepublik to make a huge development in how citizens, companies, organizations and the new "roles" should cooperate and work.

I for sure hope we will see something new and exiting for the community but make sure the platform is working before that. Accusations of old bugs/exploits still working is not helping, they need to be adressed or fixed at once.


Kape
Citizen of Erepublik
Member of 12 forums, +20 IRC-channels, sharing +20 googledocs and with a MSN filled with erepublik friends