You are of course free to create a platform that only removes illegal content, just as Twitter or YouTube is free to to remove content they don't like.

But I think you'd find two problems: determining what could be illegal is really hard (what's a "true threat" and what's a tasteless joke?), and also you'd end up with a community that looks a lot like 4chan or parler. Not a place I would choose to hang out.

> Not a place I would choose to hang out.

While that may be true.. do you not believe that the exceptional openness of either of those two platforms has an impact on places outside of them? Do you think there's no intangible benefits to you by these places merely existing?

The primary export of places like that has proven to be brigading, harassment, and bigotry in the form of memes, so...no, not really.

I have yet to hear a positive argument for their existence, and "well it collects the dirtbags!" is actually not one. I spent years tracking reactionary and fascist movements on the internet and how they interrelate and spread information; these sites more or less exist to do exactly that. The targeted harassment campagins that target random people they've decided not to like--that's just "for the lulz".

The norming of bigotry should be recognized and acted against when it occurs. When that norming is done through (shitty) humor, it should be pointed out as such. Did you have a point to make?

> do you not believe that the exceptional openness of either of those two platforms has an impact on places outside of them?

Oh, there's definitely an impact.

> Do you think there's no intangible benefits to you by these places merely existing?

Yeah, the campaigns to harass a game emulator developer to suicide because "40% is a good start" are a fantastic benefit to society, obviously.

One wholesome thing 4chan did: Mr.Lashua's Birthday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lgw7YUYgIc

What places? Like a hypothetical anti-censorship platform, or are you thinking of something that already exists like 4chan (if that even counts)?

Many well regarded distributed platforms are like that too (the web and blogosphere, email, mastodon, xmpp&matrix). The common feature is federated islands that can somewhat form filtered views of the global system.

I think we have proven time and time again that you can not actually create your own platform, if you try then come after your hosting providers, your network provider, your advertisers, your payment processors, and if that fails they find your family to go after their employers, etc etc etc

So the "just create your own platform" trope has be tried and failed.

You would never want to use a big platform that had no moderation, the quality would be shit. For a small, niche platform, it's fine, but as platforms grow they get filled with 13 year-olds posting garbage, which someone has to clean up to avoid driving away other users.

See, for example, the Eternal September

I don’t agree that decent conversation can only exist with heavy moderation.

If you haven’t seen the issue with echo chambers by now… you’re in one.

Become a mod on a reasonably sized forum and see for yourself.

I do not want to, nor do I use any of the big platforms now... I have no twitter account, no facebook account, no insta account, no tiktok account, etc...

I have locals.com account, reddit accounts (which is diminishing amount of my usage as they continue to "mainstream" aka censor the site) , and HN, that is pretty much it for me

The quality decline from mainstreaming isn't due to censorship, it's due to the increased presence of normies and children. Meanwhile the heavy-handed censorship of subreddits like AskHistorians has resulted in the preservation of high quality standards.

> Platforms that claim to be open content systems...should only remove content that is illegal in nature

So if I were to continuously upload hours-long videos of digital noise, thousands of them, millions, YouTube ought to be obligated to host these ersatz videos, and not remove them unless they were deemed illegal? In that case, someone could in theory run a successful encrypted cloud backup business off YouTube's servers. Or just use YouTube as a massive versioning backup for their own personal data, confident in the knowledge that the files can never be deleted.