You're posting this comment on Hacker News and not 4Chan for a reason. Censorship is absolutely essential to make an internet community tolerable to people outside a tiny cohort of edgelords.

That's true. But that's mostly about different userbases. HN is actually not all that censored. It's largely community moderated. Very little gets completely deleted, just downvoted and flagged to oblivion.

Disruptive users do get shadow-banned, but it's trivial to create new ones. With accumulating karma, there is some pressure to self-censor. But overall, I like it better than StackExchange or reddit, for example.

Edit: I just noticed that this submission about Bitcoin energy use has been raised from the dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498776

The important distinction is censorship of citizen-vs-citizen aggression, and censorship of political dissent. (If Hacker News unconditionally deleted all criticism of YC companies, I'd visit 4chan instead.)

And that implies we can't solve the issue with technology alone. Moderation needs to be possible, but we have to figure out a way to prevent abuse.

I don't think these ideas need to be a binary choice. Some amount of redundancy may be beneficial. Strong anonymous communication is desirable when trying to defend against the state but at the same time if it's accessible and anonymous I'd argue it has the same vulnerabilities as Facebook or Twitter currently do with regard to being a non-obvious (to the layperson) propaganda tool. On the other hand, a state sponsored system runs the risk of being used to suppress dissidence. It could be argued that having both and simply paying the cost of redundancy might be a good idea. I don't know if it's the direction I'd argue for, but it's the first thing to come to mind as an off the cuff solution.