> I don't foresee any backpedaling since few people want to stand up for porn and the principle of filtering search results has been established for years.
Absolutely, good point. I suppose why I'm so riled up about this is that I can't think of a single plausible development that could have as effectively induced opposition to these things as this... and the story doesn't seem to be catching. It had a chance, it was starting to gain momentum, but...
One of the largest organized places without this stigma, and one of the few places which wider opposition or outrage could have very quickly formed around; which all major news organizations regularly plumb for content, and which serves as one of the primary canonical barometers for (knee-jerk) public reaction to political technology issues -- Reddit -- has had its two largest initial threads on the subject removed from public visibility. Both of which were at the top of the default front page at the time of their removal, with 2200 comments between them.
I'm not sure of the actual mechanism for removing them from their previous places on their respective subreddits' and the collective front page. The threads still exist and are active, but are not readily discoverable. I'm successfully fighting the natural reaction attributing this to a malicious conspiracy: most likely, each was removed for breaking its respective subreddit's rules on editorialized headlines, self-posting, and subject matter -- r/wtf, the host for the larger of the two, explicitly forbids political content.
But, as of the posting of this comment, those two threads were the only place I've found on the internet where anywhere near as large a discussion as this warrants was happening (seriously, how is this very HN thread still so dead? 3 posts as of an hour+ on the front page). And no other discussion yet, even within Reddit, has taken their place. This is still very niche news, barely known even to communities whose bread-and-butter is outrage over far less extreme instances of creeping... however you want to characterize this.
Very unfortunate decision on the part of whichever moderators removed those threads. I hope this comment will be an embarrassing overreaction I'll wish desperately I could wipe from my HN history, but if nothing else picks up their momentum while this story is still fresh, that could be a decision that has subtle consequences on a historical scale.
At the very least, I've not seen, in any of the conversations I've read so far, a moderating voice of reason explain why this story isn't as big a deal as the common reaction to it, among people aware of it at all, seems to be (which is something that usually emerges from the froth). Can anyone help frame this as something less important than I seem to see it as?