zlacker

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+(OP)
> if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich

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

>>nailer+LD2
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+9M2
ok. I’m invoking Godwin’s law though so won’t be participating.

>>nailer+OK3
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+gM3
Nazism is not the point. It’s a vast exaggeration and laughable straw man.

>>nailer+rS6
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.