[nelsonweiss]

I don't think Mr. Atwood is suggesting that you bow to what the community wants, but rather that you implement systems to facilitate what they're already doing anyway.

That aside, and regardless of if SO is going about topic policing in the right way, I think this bit from a guest post[1] by Randy Farmer might hint at why they're doing what they do.

"As user-generated content grows, content moderation of some sort is always required: typically, either employees scan every submission or the site’s operators deploy a reputation system to identify bad content. Simply removing the bad content isn’t usually good enough-most sites depend on search engine traffic, on advertising revenue, or both. To get search traffic, external sites must link to the content, and that means the quality of the content has to be high enough to earn those links."

[1] http://www.communityguy.com/2010/04/01/guest-post-theres-a-w...