What gets me about much of the noise in the thread du jour is the underlying assumption that, somehow, this privately owned and operated site is under any obligation to allow the same level of free speech that I would have if I stepped out my front door here in the USA.
It is not under that obligation. It never has been.
If folks want to get upset there has been a shift in what's considered 'appropriate' material for the site, okay - having been here a while, I don't think that's an entirely unfounded claim. If they want to get upset about the manner in which the affected material was removed, and/or the lack of communication about that, fine - again, not without some merit. If there is concern about what one of the mods said:
If you jerk it off to little kids, go and do it elsewhere; there are sites that specialise in that.
...well, I actually entirely agree with this one. Note they're not actually calling anyone a pedophile, just saying that if someone is, that someone should find a new place to get their source material.
However, this site is not answerable to its users with respect to the removal of content in any real legal sense - the users are not shareholders or trustees or anything else. If the actual owners/operators/stakeholders/whatever decide to make changes to the rules or content, they can do so without approval from anyone else, and they are under no requirement to announce those changes in advance.
There are a large number of people who dropped into the other thread today with the mistaken idea that their rights were somehow being violated because some titles were removed, when in reality they never had any such rights to begin with. The rules and terms are pretty clear that the site has the right to remove content it feels is inappropriate, and there are enough broadly worded clauses in those that I believe removal can be done for any subjective reason.
If the idea of being subject to the whims of the site operators concerns you, I would suggest you find some other site to join. I am rather skeptical that at this time there are many left that don't share the same underlying subjectivity to a greater or lesser degree - some simply exercise it less.
