I would like to echo thedead's and even Dave999's (I'd thank him if he hadn't thanked himself so many times ) posts.

I'd rather have more freedom of expression than necessary in a forum than less. Censoring is a slippery slope. Too strict rules just drives away people eventually.

Internet as a whole is just like the world we inhabit. You see all kinds of people, the academics, the working man, the drunks even the drug addicts... high class, low class, foreigners, commies, and honest to god capitalists. You pass them every day. It doesn't mean you have to stop and start a conversation with people you find repulsive for whatever reason. The same applies to this place. Ignoring people, topics, posts, is even easier here than avoiding rambling drunk in the street or some nut-case telling about the end of the world.

In the end it comes down to the question, does this place have useful information and does it serve a purpose? And I must stress I don't mean whether the ratio of uninteresting posts is larger than the useful stuff. The material that is not interesting is very easy to skip.

I think it is unrealistic to keep some quality standards in internet, which is a mirror of the world we live in. The larger the amount of people, the more varied will the material be. And the larger the population, the more towards average it will become. It's not a bad thing, it's just what it is.