Nice funny article, and it hits home as someone who has been around on small lenient websites that have grown up and on those that have grown down.

A fun point to highlight is that (one you have enough users for these issues to arise) it’s essentially illegal to have “REAL and TRUE™ free speech” in USA, or basically anywhere. And for a for-profit (rather than for-politics or for-ideals or niche small sites) then allowing ‘bad speech’ (for whatever societies consider bad) will lose potential earnings as you see in Level 3 and more.

If you’ve ever been on really liberal (as in, freedom) sites that don’t have a strict topic, even those that haven’t hit the critical mass that creates the legal troubles, they’re still generally dominated by horrible people that quickly make you value some degree of moderation or even censorship. Especially since those places are usually disproportionately filled with the people that get banned everywhere else.

With all due respect for the values of open dialogue and the importance of honest self-expression, I often like to have conversations without them getting constant hijacked by spammer bots, bad-faith flamers with no interest in dialogue, people mentally incapable of a simple sequitur conversation and outcasts trying to justify genocide or child abuse. So I see where ‘free speech’ people are coming from but they usually have no experience with the reality of which other people want that freedom even more and how intolerable they become when they find a safe haven to flood into.