Before the Planet module existed, there was a problem with the operators of Planet arbitrarily filtering content (without telling anyone) and even silently removing blogs because, in the Planet operators’ opinion, the blog content was irrelevant. That was very bad, and Planet has been much healthier since then, though a bit less interesting.

Since then, there’s been quite a bit of self-censorship; that is, people who would regularly post interesting non-Mozilla content a few times a month (bsmedberg, preed, bz come to mind) are rarely posting interesting things—granted they’re all posting less now, but those fewer posts are predominantly Mozilla-related—and it’s rather sad. Of course, many new Planet additions since the Planet module came into existence choose to only submit Mozilla-related posts, which is fine, but I don’t think we need to force anyone to do that, either. (I myself have a “software” category syndicated to Planet, because I’m a private person and am not comfortable widely disseminating more personal posts; it unfortunately is the case that recently my “software” category has been all Mozilla-related.)

Like Dao, I don’t really see any problem with the content posted to Planet currently—aside from the almost total absence of interesting non-Mozilla posts of late, and the repost problem. I find that the “noise” is generated by the incessant reposting of the same thing on multiple blogs (personal blog, hacks, devnews, Mozilla blog) that are all syndicated to Planet, and the occasional spamming of 20 old posts from certain blogs. I’d like the incessant reposting (or perhaps cross-posting, to use an old Usenet term) to stop, or to be limited to links rather than full posts), sure, but there’s nothing wrong with the content of any of those posts, just the fact we’re seeing them 3x.

Take the planet of Creative Commons, which accept all kinds of languages, for example, I think the CC Planet has more “GLOBAL community” feeling in it. I can understand that things can only go faster if it is in English, since it’s the hub language that most of us can speak. But maybe the planet part could be a little different?

If the Planet software is set up to filter content out of people’s feeds, it’s something I’m unaware of. I’ll talk to the Planet peers and find out what the situation is there.

Content-appropriateness is something that needs to be discussed, probably with a larger group (ie: amongst the community as a whole). Planet is getting pretty noisy, which makes it less useful for everyone. Let me chat with the peers and sort something out. Thanks for bringing it up.