And moderation came _very quickly_. Usenet started seeing significant use in 1983. The first moderated Usenet group was created in 1984 (insert mandatory weak Orwell joke). And Usenet was eventually largely replaced by very heavily moderated webforums, and then by things like reddit where the popular subreddits that people actually want to use are mostly fairly heavily moderated.

It turns out that people don't, as a general rule, actually enjoy using totally unmoderated fora; they tend to quickly fill with spam and awful stuff.

> I did answer, because the internet started off as your proposed experiment. It didn't work.

It worked great for multiple decades until "social media" applied algorithms that promoted controversy (i.e. anger-inducing hyperbole and conspiracy theories) to increase "engagement" and sell more ads.

That you can find an ASCII swastika or goatse on Slashdot which is instantly downvoted to -1 (but not actually removed from the site) was never a real problem. That Facebook put QAnon at the top of your mom's feed was a major problem.

But then we get calls for censorship as a response to problem created by bad moderation.

Notice that there is a difference between voting (where the community determines prioritization in a decentralized way but nothing is rendered unavailable) and censorship (where some fallible central authority is deciding what people are not allowed to know).