Early Reddit isn't what what most would call a "bad result". Ditto for early 4chan and for a lot of smaller communities that have very little restrictions on content beyond civility and anti-spamming.

The problem is that having uncensored speech doesn't scale, because eventually you'll become big enough to attract media scrutiny, which inevitably cherry-picks the worst parts of the user base. This cause 1) advertisers to pull out and 2) starts attracting more of the wrong type of users.

My point was, that it is hard and the lines are blurry.

But actually I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.

But I really don't know when was the last time, that was tried. There were times, when certain topics were ok to speak freely about, like racism, yes, but at those times other topics were restricted, so what exactly are you talking about?

There's a difference between largely unrestricted speech legally (being free from gov censorship) and having an unmoderated online community. Moderation is a good thong when done correctly, it raises the quality of the conversion by keeping bad actors and off-topic/toxic comments /post out. There's value in both tightly moderated and loosely moderated communities/spaces.

Do you know anywhere with truly unrestricted speech?

The US has the freest speech that I know of (granted it’s also the only model that I’m so familiar with), and even it has plenty of restrictions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

The restrictions on speech in the US are confined to “imminent lawless action”, per Brandenburg v Ohio. I think the commenter to whom you are replying might be entirely fine with Reddit’s speech policy following that precedent.

And no, shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater is not illegal and is protected by the First Amendment.

But you can't shout fire in crowed theater with the intent to cause chaos. You can shout fire in a crowded theater, if there is an actual fire.

Yes you can! That argument was made in a SCOTUS argument that has since been unanimously overturned.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Great read, thanks for posting. I had mistakenly thought this for a while too.

Wow. So the argument was first successfully used to jail peaceful socialists and anti-war activists, but was later overturned for benefit of the KKK.

Yup. Today, the law benefits peaceful socialists, anti-war activists, AND the KKK — which is a big win for free speech, in my books.

> I do believe in the concept of unrestricted speech.

Including illegal things?

What do you mean by that?

In Saudia Arabia it is illegal to say, God does not exist. (and in germany under special circumstances, too - meaning, if enough people would get angry at you saying that, it would be illegal for you to say so)