DrownedAmmet said:
Do you have to bring up the whole "Free Speech" and "censorship" thing? I disagree with them removing those titles from their platform, but in no way is it harming the author's ability to freely express themselves.
To be fair to the OP, Steve Wieck (President of OBS) brings up Free Speech and Censorship in his blogpost here: http://oneblogshelf.blogspot.com/2015/09/offensive-content-policy.html
Actually, for a lot of independent RPG makers, DriveThruRPG and OneBookShelf is the only direct marketing available to them. The business model, up until now, has been to encourage gamers who put in the effort to sell directly through them, which makes the product continually available for re-download to the customers.
This change will remove content that was paid for by customers, and cutting off many developers who had come to depend on OBS as their distribution platform.
A good example is Lamentation of the Flame Princess. It is an original D&D based system, using influences (as they put it) of Death Metal and horror. Many of their products have gotten their content reported because of tongue in cheek humor or adult themes, and under the new system they are likely to have their products pulled. They can't, however, contact the purchasers of those products with links to outside sites, including their own website, as per OBS rules.
In the president's words: "Further, in the case of roleplaying games, especially new games put out by independent creators or new companies, our marketplaces are a key distribution channel. If we were to ban an RPG product, the de facto result is very much like censorship. That fact causes me grave concern, for if we were to create a content guideline that all publishers on our store must follow, and then ban titles that do not meet those guidelines, then we would be playing dictator with the RPG art form, and that is a role I am acutely uncomfortable playing."
And this is one of the larger independent RPG houses. There are many many RPG designers whose work is only on OBS sites, because that partnership was a part of the business model.
Here's the issue for me. The content people took issue with was under the "Adult" tag, which means you have to be logged in, and you have to click "I want to see Adult Content" or some such in your profile information. Then, it has to come up in one of your searches, by keyword or system.
Again, the president's words: "What we will do, though, is code more customer-facing options to allow customers to report potentially offensive content to us. That way, customers can help us identify the offensive .01% of titles that much faster. If a reported title looks questionable, then we will suspend it from sale while we review its content internally, and we will speak with its publisher to determine the fate of the title on our marketplace. Our default will be to suspend titles rather than our prior default of letting titles stay public."
This means that if you can get some outrage over a book, and get a few reports in, it gets suspended from being able to be sold, pending review. If they find the content inoffensive, that may still cost the company money; and there's nothing in place right now to stop these complaints from happening again, almost immediately.
If you're still reading this, my suggestion would be to create a more versatile and defined tagging system for content (which would have the byproduct of making things easier to search), and letting people block tags from showing up in their searches. This would give users the ability to avoid content they find offensive, while also reducing the amount of review work staff has to do once a product is for sale; if you found a product you find offensive, then it was either mis-tagged or you searched for it. This will help create more tags to crystallize the system, rather than simply penalizing content creators because someone found something offensive.
