There needs to be room for public spaces to just be venues. Service providers should be able to just be service providers.
There should be limits, but they should mostly align with legal limits and they should be enforce by law enforcement officers accountable to the public primarily by observing public posts or through warrants and subpoenas.
There should additionally be norms about, broadly, what counts as disruptive behavior, but it needs to be agnostic about content.
I don't really care if it is hard to make 100 billion dollars because there are too many trolls or because the content doesn't align with "corporate values".
There's no lack of "true" free speech opportunity on the internet. Sites like stormfront and 4chan remain a thing. Don't pretend like that's what we all want from Reddit, is all I'm saying.
I want private organizations to choose between being objective platforms like libraries or subjective organizations with a voice like The Washington Post. And I want norms, not laws, to enforce that distinction.
I don't want jerks interrupting my conversations with spam, but that's a very different matter than censoring people's thoughts because I don't agree or have unpleasant emotions when exposed to them.
I think HN is overmoderated, for what it's worth. It used to be more interesting but its habit of dinging threads with lots of discussion has a habit of filtering out important discussion in addition to heated discussion.
I definitely don't hold HN accountable for what random people post here.
It sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what kind of moderation you are looking for. Have you found a forum that is aligned with that?
All forums are "plagued" in that way, though. This one too. Everyone who wants to run such a service has a personal idea of what expression is appropriate within the vision of the site and which ones aren't welcome. And everyone has personal sensitivities and makes moderation mistakes, too.
Honestly if reddit has failed, it's been in the opposite direction. They've been too lax with moderation and had to make rapid and disruptive course corrections when people point out the garbage they've been tolerating.
You have a first amendment right to express your opinions to anyone you want, but you don't have a right to do it on someone else's moderated forum.