"Terms of Use" are all over the web. It's an aggravating waste of time to have to keep reading the darn things. But if you don't, you can fall into some dire traps. I found this one on the otherwise useful
Ecogeek site today:
"By submitting your comments we reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete your comments and portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice."
In other words, the content of the comments might or might not be what the commentors actually said. It may have been modified to say something slightly -- or even totally -- different. I'm not okay with that. So I erased the draft of the comment I was working on. This makes me think much less favorably of the blog. If I'm reading comments, I'd like to know that they are the actual words of the commentor; and if I'm leaving comments, I expect them to reflect my opinion as I expressed it. It's one thing to reserve the right to
delete comments; that's one method of quashing trolls, and sometimes necessary in blogs that have a shortage of space. But modifying someone else's words in a way they might not approve -- that's right out. It's a distortion of information.
So instead of linking to the cool post that originally caught my attention, I'm writing this instead. If a site's "terms of use" annoy or offend people, that costs readership, and sometimes more.