Here's some stuff that's been bouncing around in my brain for a while...
On Poetry
First and foremost, poetry is not easy. Okay, sometimes a fine poem pops fully formed into someone's head... but that's not usually how it works, and I always suspect that when it does happen that way, it's usually because the poet has already consciously practised their craft enough for their subconscious to get the hang of it. In almost all cases, writing a good poem takes some application.
Imagining that poetry is easy is, I think, a common mistake. In fact I strongly suspect that it is the mistake at the root of at least half of all genuinely bad poems, as well as forming part of the reason some people dismiss poetry in general a bit too easily. I went to see Stephen Fry talk a couple of years ago, in connection with his book 'The Ode Less Travelled', and he was at pains to point out how much work a lot of poets put into what they do: Reading of other poets, really taking time to find exactly the right way to put something. It seems sort of obvious now, but I'd never really thought about that much before.
He also read a passage from a poem by one of the all-time great terrible poets, William McGonagall, about the Tay Bridge disaster, in which many people plunged to their deaths. The overwhelming impression of this poem is one of staggering bathos, a serious topic addressed with a painfully comic poem. This is almost certainly unintentional, and probably followed directly from McGonagall's mysterious belief that he was an extraordinarily gifted poet - that the Queen was most remiss in not appointing him Poet Laureate, and great poetry simply flowed from his pen. If he had questioned this and taken the time to make really sure his lines scanned, and rhymed well enough where they were supposed to, and generally didn't sound silly, he probably would not have ended up on the pages of history as the literary disaster he was.
So, poems have a hard time of it on Everything2, as in life. A lot of that is probably unavoidable, because how well they work is deeply subjective - certainly more so than most other forms of writing. Almost any given poem (perhaps especially free verse) will be greeted with bafflement and/or repulsion by some proportion of the people who read or hear it. Rejection is therefore a major part of the Everything2 experience for most who submit poems here. Many poems are deleted because they don't work with more than a smallish minority of readers, and honestly, I believe that is why the site is not packed to the rafters with awful poetry. One of the things we ask of anyone who submits writing here is that they learn how to handle rejection.
Now I'm not saying that the voting public or the editorial team are always right about poems, of course. However it is quite clearly the case that a total failure to moderate poetry submissions would lead to a much, much higher proportion of the site consisting of poetry that any given person will not like - that they could be forgiven for describing as 'bloody awful'. Perhaps you can already see this coming - I am also going to suggest that in many cases (certainly not all), poems that tank here could have gone down much better if their authors had spent some more time hammering them into just the right shape. If you want to get your poems critiqued before you post them here (or even afterwards), I understand that the e2verse usergroup exists largely for this purpose. If you are not comfortable with your work being critiqued and potentially removed from view, this is not the venue for you.
On Spoilers, Reviews and Analysis
Spoilers are another issue that comes up a lot both on Everything2 and in the wider world. Many writeups about films, TV shows, books and so on discuss their plots in more detail than you would find in any magazine. There is definitely a place for that - often people make very interesting points which can not be made without potentially spoiling the experience later for someone who isn't familiar with it. However, my feeling is that writing on Everything2 always works best when it's aimed at the widest possible audience, and usually you cut off the vast majority of your readers once you get into spoiler territory.
There is no rule that says you have to write for the widest possible audience here, of course. People write engagingly on many topics which don't make sense without a certain amount of background knowledge, and on the whole I'm glad we have a lot of writeups about (say) topics in mathematics which I can't actually get my head around because I only have a physics degree. However, I'm always a lot happier when there is at least something I can follow there, and it's just the same with reviews. It's frustrating not to be able to read a writeup about a film or whatever because it's full of spoilers right from the beginning, especially when there isn't another writeup that covers stuff like what sort of a film it is, and whether it's any good.
So this is a gentle suggestion to bear in mind how many of your potential readers won't know what you're talking about when discussing this sort of thing, and consider breaking your writeup into two parts (divided by a spoiler warning) if you want to get into things that would spoil the experience of what you're writing about for the majority of your readers. This next bit is more of an irascible demand than a gentle suggestion: Don't ever launch straight into spoilers, and don't ever fail to warn us about that stuff. That's just rude.