Unarguable, Nairaland is the most visited Nigerian owned site and a lot of commendation should go to the founder of the site for his vision.

Quite a number of Nigerians depend on Nairaland not only for news stories but the reaction of Nigerians to those stories.

As an open platform it is very democratic and the problem with that is control.

In other to control the kind of information that can appear on the site the moderators have decided to insert a software that will automatically change certain words into more decent sounding ones.

Certain words are not allowed on the site: For instance, “penis” becomes “joystick” and “Porn” becomes “indecency”.

I found it quite hilarious when I saw a post on “Bosom Cancer”! Seriously? Even the word, “breast” cannot be used on the site.

It gets even more ridiculous, “Retard” becomes “slowpoke”. Whoever coined the word, “slowpoke”?

What these moderators have to realise is that these words are proper English words and removing them from a story or a post simply changes the essence of that story.

There are other ways to properly monitor a site.

The interesting thing is that this type of editing is definitely software operated and should you want to beat the software put an dot (.) in front of each word, like this, “p.e.n.i.s.” and you get your word published but you just may incur the wrath of the moderators.

Like most leading institutions in Nigeria, Nairaland is being managed by ignorant, lazy, self-serving individuals who think they have been put in charge of a service because they are cleverer than the people using that service.