Newsvine

Oh Newsvine, what an adventure you have proven to be. After I signed up for the site I spent a few days looking at the different nations, getting the lay of the land. Some of them were of passing interest, inasmuch as I enjoy satire and odd stories, but there wasn't really anything relevant to libraries or information science. I applied to join five or six nations and received no responses. I seeded two articles related to technology in libraries with a couple of sentences describing them. Finally I joined one of the two open nations. I looked around a bit, saw what kind of stories were being posted, and decided to post one on the Stanford rape case. A few other articles on the subject had been seeded, and people generally seemed to have the same reactions that I had (horror, disgust, anger), so it seemed like a safe choice. And yet, when I checked back a few hours later, my account had been suspended :|
Fortunately, this put me in good company, as some of my other classmates had also been suspended. We were all given boilerplate language about posts for self-promotion and links to promotional sites being forbidden, but it seems like they probably send it out to every new poster who seems even a little suspicious. The whole site seems like a direct reaction against communities like Reddit where vitriol and personal attacks are part of daily interactions. They've created a closed community, and the moderators err on the side of caution when it comes to new users.