Thanks, Dave! And, a question.

[RogerGreenP]

As a new member here, I was happy to find this forum. Thanks for the efforts Dave, and all!!

I'm not South African but have lived for some years in the WC, and consider this fantastic place home.

I have been troubled by the lack of good places to share ideas, especially opinions about the SA news coverage and government actions. Every place has issues, but the extent of attempted information control by media such as News24, etc is troubling. By that, I mean real comments aren't allowed and many articles seem like they are approved by a government agency.

Are there other places I've overlooked where free exchanges of ideas about SA are promoted?

[Dave A]

First, welcome to TFSA, RogerGreenP.
Second, let's throw out the question to everyone. This is a forum website, not a blog.
Then to matters at hand -

As you have probably discovered already, the aim of this site was (and hopefully still is) to encourage open and frank engagement on issues. After 16 years of trying to moderate that engagement, I can tell you that unfortunately some people will use their "right to freedom of speech" to treat the space in the most atrocious ways. This poses a number of problems if left unchecked, not least of which being that the place becomes absolutely unpleasant to visit for the people you are trying to attract if you don't engage in some level of moderation.

I suspect that over time this means the site (and by this I mean any site) tends to coalesce into a character of sorts that some will align with, and others will feel distinctly disassociated with.

I know that some main stream media have had enormous difficulty in dealing with their comments section. Some have even disabled comments completely as a result.

On the vanilla nature of mainstream media in South Africa
Look, I certainly don't believe it is a result of government agency control. More a case of appealing to one's target audience and not offending the advertisers.
That said, there is little doubt that South Africa has some holy cows that result in severe responses. But if that is your thing, there are extremist sites out there.

The marvel of the internet - there's a website or more for every perversion.