I would rather have lively discussions that sometimes attract trolls than an insipid, dry, non-discussion discussion.

The moment you need to moderate every comment, and worry that you might get sued/prosecuted by people whose discrimination is different to yours, is the moment you simply become a censor or simply drop comments altogether.

With the advent of automated trolling and state and corporate propaganda machines (see: persona management automation software), maybe the default should be "off" on comments unless the forum has sufficient moderation capabilities.

It's like arguing against firewalls on the open Internet.

How about the owner/operator of the site decides?

It only helps the big ones to become stronger. Companies like Facebook have the partners, the tech, the lawyers, the lobbying power, etc to turn developments like this ultimately into a competitive advantage.

Small players, like startups with innovative ideas, will have more and more difficulties to survive.

Facebook, the New York Times and Cloudflare are all free to police or not police their platforms against hate speech as they want to be. (Thankfully they've all come around to realizing hate speech is not good).

However once the government gets involved, that's when we've lost free speech. Free speech protections have always been in place to ensure you can't go to jail for what you're saying. What they aren't for, is making private individuals and corporations harbor any kind of speech on their property. It'll be truly scary if the government starts forcing corporations to censor speech. Let's leave the pressure we put on these firms to consumers, activists and shareholders.

Governments are like corporations in many ways, except they have voting rights for their constituency. They're just another group of people.

Sure, governments have guns, but as long as there is a constitution preventing abuses and the rule of law, that is constrained.

The bigger danger is cooption of governments by corporations and other powerful interest groups that have no such protections/limitations.

You may want that but there is not clear line for a blurry and highly politically charged concept like sexism. A comment such as « my gf just cook an amazing cake, she’s awesome » could perfectly be labeled as sexist by some activist because associating a woman with cooking is deemed sexist.

In addition, in the European context the racism part will be used to censure comments critizing the immigration politics of Western Europe countries (which every citizen should be able to discuss given the importance of it) and any discussions about Islam that don’t go the way the government want it to go. In fact, this is already happening for years and it is a worrying fact.

That's incorrect. There is no such censoring. At least as far as I've seen, and I live in Europe, in the country that has accepted the most refugees from Syria per person in the country (plus many migrants/refugees from other places in the Middle East and Africa).

Everyone is free to discuss the immigration politics on the Internet and elsewhere, and plenty of people are angry about it. There are even political parties that have this thing as their main agenda.

So what is the scalable solution to allow discussion without causing automated censorship, inflicting astroturfing vulnerability, or hiring significant staff overhead that allows things like reddit to start up, or are you happy with the ecosystem we have?

Perhaps a pay-to-post scheme. If it takes $1 to make a post people will comment a lot less, and hopefully when they do comment it'll be saying something meaningful. This will also help reduce automated span.

Personally I'm a fan of more speech, vice less, in hopes that more insightful things bubble up, voting algorithms are an intresting puzzle but I'd prefer to see discussion without making people who can't afford it silent.

It's not meant to have a scalable solution. Of course, some players will be able to afford an AI-based solution. Their fora will be insipid and dry.

Push comments off your site and onto Twitter/Reddit.