The folks who run MetaFilter, Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, and any number of other large public forums would likely disagree with you. It seems that globs of angsty folks who up-vote off-topic vitriol (and down-vote things that they just don't like!) tend to occur in any open-access forum that becomes sufficiently popular.

Democracy is a sub-optimal tool for promoting productive, on-topic discussion in popular public-access forums. Look at the pile of largely useless babble that is Slashdot or Youtube comments, or comments on articles attached to the Reddit frontpage for supporting evidence. Hell, even when it was small, MetaFilter understood the serious need for human moderators to help keep discussions civil and on track.

> ...I've heard that I'm not the only one put on rankban for criticizing VC.

I didn't and don't expect you to be swayed by my claims. You appear to be a person with very strongly held opinions. For the benefit of others, I'll summarize my previous post succinctly.

For a several month period at some point in the not-too-distant past, I could guarantee three things:

1) For any randomly selected story that had something to do with Google that was still on the front page in the afternoon, a comment of yours would be one of the top four comments.

2) Your comment would have little to nothing to say about the article it was attached to (unless that article was about some management technique), and lots to say about what you felt was wrong at Google during your (allegedly) brief tenure at the company.

3) The volume of heated discussion attached to your comment would dwarf the discussion (either off-topic or on) in any other thread.