Pleasing Google - Should I remove the 'low-value' links ?

We operate a Forum under our webshop. it has over 10k posts by now.

In the past months I am continuously getting emails from other site's operators, webmasters asking me to remove some links pointing to their website from ours. These links are mostly in our Forums placed by our customers with good intent to help each other showing a related product, a review, tips and tricks, etc. in their posts. We are not constantly monitoring the contents of our forum, there were only some cases we had to remove some spam or vulgarity. We never thought to remove a useful link placed by our visitors or felt the authority to edit their writing in any way.

These emails however ask us to remove these 'low-value' links because 'they significantly harm the SEO-rating' of those sites they point to, some say that they harm us also. According the these emails and the opinions I read on various SEO blogs website operators should be cooperative removing these links in their own interest.

My questions to you are:

How does it come Google (indirectly) forces us to impose a censorship on what my visitors are saying ? How Google (and its SEO-zombie followers) dare to valuate my customers' altruist effort to help each other (sometimes spending hours with typing, searching) as 'low-value' and to be disposed of just because it was not posted to the top of CNN.com's homepage with a H1 tag?

If I decide to obey, how am I supposed to communicate this to my visitors: Their post was censored/edited why ? ..because their writing was just 'low-value' ? ...or he/she himself is a 'low-value' person, or just we ourselves (my company, our site) is a 'low-value' place in the eyes of the great God..ogle he should not post at all to.

Isn't Google destroying (with the help of us SEO-slaves) what the Internet is all about ?

So should I really obey to please Google and remove these links, or else I get punished by a lower SERP position ? Do the other sites we link to get punished if I don't obey these silly rules ?

(Why am I using the word 'punish' at all ? what are we being punished for ? Am I being punished for allowing my visitors include a link?  by whom am I punished ?   Are there 1st-5th SERP class sites/citizens and are there 78-98451th class sites/citizens ?  The former can not just link, but their links are adored, and the latter dare not link ?  What is all this becoming ?  and we are not just teaching this weirdo on SEO blogs and all try to obey as submissively as possible, but even willingly accept that the rules are not clear: we are not deserving to even know the rules we must obey...)

So do I get it right ? Being on the x-th place with my site I dare not link, but if I manage to reach y-th place I will not just be allowed to link, but my links will be adored ?  ...just wondering would I be then asked by the same webmasters to reinsert the deleted links into the posts of my customers ? ;-)

Or should we just add a nofollow attribute to the links our customers place in their posts to please Google ?  Is the nofollow attribute meant for this ?  How can I do it to be added automatically when a visitor enters a post with links in it ?  (I would appreciate a clue to show it in the source code what to modify)  ...this could be implemented together with a sitewide setting (commonsettings.lowvaluesite Boolean value) whether the owner considers his site as 'low-value'.  Would this satisfy Google ?

What do you think about it?

PS. Did I place the keywords 'Google' and 'low-value' enough and properly, so Google crawls this post effectively and someone realizes how harmful is all this ?  ;-)

This is a very interesting and important issue. IMHO no web contents or links done in good faith should be removed or censored.

I googled  this and opinions about "low value" sites/blogs are not very clear. Here they mention that webmasters can disavow low value links.

It would be very valuable to hear other community members opinion