Voat turned into a gathering place for racists because reddit at first only kicked those out - and became more fundamentalist only after voat was the well-known 'bad place for bad people' where 'respectable, but misunderstood people' did not linger. The frog cooks slowly.

> If there is, it's certainly not a profitable product.

I think this is the main issue: that we walled up our discussion plazas to make them 'profitable products'.

I know I am a bit of an idealist here, but I miss the old-timey usenet, basically an agora where you could filter yourself (with the appropriately-called killfile), and which was not controlled by one institution alone). I had some hope with federated systems - but these are often built with censorship mechanisms written right into it, and again give operators too much influence on what their users may or may not see.

All I know for sure about this is that the only platforms I use consistently have very strong moderation. I'm tempted to believe that for most practical purposes you cannot build a functional community without active moderation to which the users either explicitly or implicitly consent, so from my point of view many small, strongly moderated, platforms are better than one big unmoderated one, even if I can control what I see on it.

Oh, usenet was as strongly or weakly moderated as you wanted it to be - the moderation was done by yourself. This is much preferable to some underpaid kid with questionable understanding on how the world works deciding what reaches your eyes for you.

I remember the time when it was en vouge for subreddits to ban people for participating in subreddits they personally disagree with (automated, regardless of how that participation took place).

You cannot have a free exchange of ideas with a centralised thought police. You can only have truly free communication if you yourself decide what you read, and what you block out.

I guess I don't think of moderation as thought police. What good moderators do, usually, is boot/pause people who aren't interacting in good faith. I am all about free speech, but I do not believe we need to tolerate bad faith interactions either personally or as a community. If a person is clearly trying to overwhelm the community with spam or trolling, I really, profoundly, do not care if a moderator of a small community shows them the door.

For bigger platforms which operate as a public forum I think the case is stronger for weak moderation, but even in those situations a bad faith actor (say perhaps a state or corporate actor with a lot of money to blow on bots) can completely undermine the purpose of those forums. I really can't imagine how a transparent moderation policy in such a situation isn't at least practically useful. In the end you cannot have a free exchange of ideas if some parties are intentionally manipulating, trolling, or flooding the zone of exchange.

Congress isn't just a free for all of people yelling at eachother. There are rules, not to moderate free speech, but to just make hundreds of people cooperating a possibility.

Of course, there is a middle ground. You just need better and stricter moderation, like on HN, for example.