zlacker

Apparently you've actually published work yourself? Did your publisher print, bind and release every single word submitted to it without any human intervention at all, and then ad hoc remove a small proportion of the content after objections and bar a small proportion of users from further submissions? If not, why are you pretending that two completely different processes are the same?

Nobody argues that owners of physical premises should choose between accepting full responsibility for every action on their premises or being utterly powerless to eject any person for any reason.

>>notaha+(OP)
Hi, I’m a published author and I can assure you my publisher did not attempt to change opinions or other ideas, whether subjective or objective, in the resulting work. Rather they were concerned with brevity and storytelling.

>>nailer+5b
So there was an actual editorial process before publication, not publication of everything submitted to it by default and subsequent ad-hoc removal of a few things that most offended its customers?

I'll take your word for it that none of your opinions or ideas were controversial enough to upset your publisher, but do you feel the editorial process would have been completely uninterested in removing opinions or other ideas before publication if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich or suggesting that the practice of software development would be greatly improved by only allowing men to participate in it?

>>notaha+od
> if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich

Do you think that’s what we’re discussing here? Fascinating.

>>nailer+9R2
Well, assuming we're still discussing the issue of whether removing a subset of user-generated content makes website owners publishers, then I think it's quite reasonable to ask whether your publisher would remain solely concerned with brevity and style if they received submissions incorporating the same range of opinions and ideas as social media.

>>notaha+xZ2
ok. I’m invoking Godwin’s law though so won’t be participating.

>>nailer+cY3
The tendency of open internet discussion to inexorably tend towards talking about Nazis (and the Godwin corollary that when open internet discussion reaches Twitter-scale, it inevitably attracts participants wanting to defend the Nazis) was the point. Publishers don't have to deal with that bullshit, which is one of the reasons why publishing isn't remotely similar to forum moderation. If they did, they'd be a lot more censorious on the ideas and opinions side.

>>notaha+EZ3
Nazism is not the point. It’s a vast exaggeration and laughable straw man.

>>nailer+P57
Sure, there are absolutely no neo-Nazis or kids cosplaying being neo-Nazis or else remotely analogous to neo-Nazism on social media. How silly of me to imagine that social media moderators were deciding if and how to deal with ideas and opinions more likely to be deemed hateful or objectionable by their customers and illegal by certain jurisdictions than the manuscripts your publisher solicits.