I mean, if you find a community that fits to your expectations, you’ll probably think, they have free speech figured out alright. Whereas if you enter a community with lots of people disagreeing with you and your posts getting removed, you’ll probably think the opposite, even if in total, they remove the same number of posts/comments.

I know what you mean. No, it wouldn’t be like that for me. I actually think that everybody should speak their mind, not only people I approve of. If there are posts removed because of political opinion or disagreement, then there is no free speech. It is selective free speech, which is no free speech.

There will always be statements that people will be uncomfortable with (thankfully so)

In the history of humans, there were a lot of uncomfortable statements that got dealt with rather harshly. Today, they are common sense. For example that the earth rotates around the sun, or how evolution works.

or that they just consider too dumb to even discuss

I guess back then, there were people who thought that discussing the NSA and what they do is nothing but conspiracy theory, and what people are suggesting is just dumb and can’t possibly be true. Now we know that it was even worse than the “conspiracy theorists” were imagining it.

If you ask me, a good voting system is the way to go. Of course this depends on most people actually using it how it is intended. If someone does contribute to the discussion with quality posts, then the comment should be upvoted. Even if the comment disagrees with you, and even if the comment has a political stance that isn’t the same as the voters one. Downvotes should only be used for content that is not contributing to the discussion, is offtopic or even meant to hinder discussion.

That way, the most interesting and qualitative posts and comments are on the top, while nothing is being removed or hidden.