I don't really have any problems with Grant's rules. After all it's not a democracy, it's his site, so he can decide what's acceptable and what's not. And most of the time it is fairly cut and dried - this link is some chancer being paid to promote something = snip. That link is someone wanting free advertising = snip. The other link is trying to drive traffic to an eg YouTube channel / clickbait site where eyeballs mean money = snip.

At the other end there's links that come up in the course of valid discussions - 'here's what I mean', or 'this is what I used'. Many of those end up at commercial sites but they're not snipped, mainly, I'd guess anyway, because there's no direct commercial gain being made - it's mainly an exchange of information. That, when all is said and done, is what we come here for. Questions and answers, freely peergroup given.

But, as always, there are grey areas. Links to personal YouTube sites, posts that start off as 'here's my experience in South America / Africa / Road of Bones' etc and end 'my book of the trip is now on Amazon', 'Big Names' that pop up with a fairly bland post aimed at keeping them in the public eye, references in the text to other people's commercial sites, people who put a bit more effort in than just a mild profanity and a link, and all the rest. All of which could fall one side of the line today and the other side tomorrow. I got my personal travel site snipped many years ago and my wrist slapped for including it in my signature even though it had no money making content whatsoever and was purely for entertainment, yet I notice other have not. Maybe they've contributed, but I was never asked for money, just told to remove it. Maybe a different moderator on a different day would have reached a different conclusion but it was what it was and that's the rules we play by. I used to think the balance point was 'here's something I did' = snip, but 'here's something he did' (that I think is relevent to the topic and I'm not making any money out of it) = tick, but it's obviously more nuanced than that.

I guess things are different over on HU Facebook where a lot of the contributions are blatently nothing but self promotion. If you snipped them there wouldn't be much left.

I do notice that there are far fewer verbal fist fights these days than there used to be. Whether that's the smack of firm moderation - a sort of snip first and sort it out afterwards approach, or that we're just a nicer bunch of people these days I can't tell (probably we're all older!) but it certainly has made it a more pleasant place to 'hang out'.