You are posting on a platform that has a moderation policy and takes active measures to to moderate away problematic content. The guidelines are here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and they clearly state what content is off limits.
How is this a "gotcha" when I'm on the internet I'm being forced to use? I pick the most agreeable platforms. I like that HN filters out politics, sports, and celebrities, it's more like a themed forum than an open board. HN doesn't deem these topics as "problematic", simply as off-topic.
Anyway my point was "problematic content" is often used as a buzzword by censorship happy people, and ends up being synonymous with "something I disagree with." We have just literally seen the real life consequences of pushing for censorship — that it will eventually be used against speech that one agrees with — and nobody quite seems to care.
If you read the guidelines, there’s quite a bit about being polite and not inciting flame wars, not only off topic items. It regularly happens that posts or even users get removed for that reason.
There are platforms that have much less strict standards with regards to that - yet you consider this the more agreeable platform. Maybe the reason is that it’s actually nicer to have a conversation in a place where you don’t need to deal with an asshole that starts yelling and insulting everyone at the table.
Think about this in real life: would you want to frequent a place where the loudest asshole gets to insult everyone present or would you rather go to a bar where at some point the Barkeeper steps in and sorts things out?
You're speaking of some idealized moderation system where tone and politeness is enforced, and human corruptibility does not entice moderators into censoring speech they disagree with? Yeah sure, I'd love to be there. It's just a rare thing to find on the modern web, and it's not guaranteed to last for any length of time.
The modern web example of your bar scenario is more like this: the bartender doesn't want to hear [opposing political/societal issue opinion] at the bar and starts kicking out everyone he disagrees with. The kicked out people go start their own bar. Now there's two neighboring bars, MAGABar and LibBar; customers are automatically filtered into attending either bar by an algorithm. If you say anything that the bartender disagrees with, you're permanently banned. The fun part is that you can be permanently banned from BOTH bars if your viewpoints don't fall in line 100% with what the bartender wants to hear.
Oh and you can't go to TechBar anymore either, the bartender heard you said something critical of furries at another bar, so now you're banned and not allowed to talk about computers.
Unmoderated platforms are pretty much useless. Having said that, I'd prefer governments to stay away from either moderating or forcing platforms to moderate content
Perhaps there's simply no middle ground between something like Voat which turned into a gathering place of bonafide racists, and something like Reddit which is essentially just a confirmation bias hugbox. If there is, it's certainly not a profitable product.
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.
Who defines what "problematic content" is?