Wait, are you referring to your post on May 28th where you, again, tried to derail yet another post about a thing by having a meta-conversation about amazon affiliate links, despite that fact being in the footer of every Boing Boing post, in our privacy policy, despite having explained this over and over ad nauseam?
That wasn’t on a whim. That was offtopic, annoying, and a not-so-subtle way to take a jab at one of the revenue sources that pays for the very place you are posting on.
I have written multiple screeds now on not only that topic, but the topic of advertising on both the BBS and on Boing Boing. We would love to live in a world where curated, interesting advertising paid the bills and we could annoy people less to keep the lights on, but as with most off-the-cuff remarks on this subject, the amount of effort our publisher puts into to keeping all of this from sucking more is grossly underestimated. No one here wants shitty content. No one here shills for a company posting crap. Authors post about stuff they find interesting or cool or valuable, full stop.
And frankly, we aren’t going to keep talking about it, or keep letting posts get derailed talking about it.
The authority of the Authors here stems from it being their place. If you don’t want to support Boing Boing then don’t post here. There are 20k other members who will happily take your place and who want independent publishing on the web to be a thing.
Or, you know - post those comments in one of the umpteen meta topics that have been opened on the topic of affiliates and ads, don’t just presume you are entitled to derail a conversation because you feel like it’s your duty-bound honour to “stick it to the man” today.
Our decisions aren’t petty. I’ve worked hard to be transparent about moderation decisions and the reasoning behind what we do here, and the implication that anyone here is just running around removing content on a whim is specious and inflammatory.