There used to be a fair chance that you'd stumble on CSAM on 4chan. Without filtering and aggressive moderation, that's what ends up happening (yes 4chan did have moderation to delete the stuff back then and dish out IP bans, but it wasn't fast enough to save people from seeing those things)

One alternative to moderation is to make people pay to post. If you set the price high enough, you'll disuade most spammers and some other species of asshole. Unfortunately, people who hate moderation also tend to hate paying for online services.

True, this keeps the community small and those work really well without moderation.

The moment it becomes a bit more popular, shit hits the fan. I am still for a light approach. Banning spammers, trolls, and illegal porn posters is a separate issue for me, but many platforms began to delete unpopular opinions.

The most heavy handed moderated places are very often the most toxic ones, I think they are far worse than free for all examples. Given, that might not work for the masses.

>but we've never actually had a chance to see one

Have we not had site after site that does this eventually start moderating for reasons every time? And we have darkweb sites...

What are we missing?

This is false. 4chan, some early reddit, voat, and a number of other sites.

Moreover, that's the point: it's as i.possible to have a healthy anonymous forum available to the world as it is to have a large society with no laws or government, that isn't dystopian.

> early reddit

Reddit is the best example of why heavy moderation is worse than lack of moderation.

It's a difficult problem.

No moderation = porn, gore and nazi discussion. Period.

"Light" moderation often = bad-faith trolls taking advantage of your moderation.

HN does a good job of moderating for civility and effort of the post, rather than ideology.

Here's the thing: Talking about controversial topics, or debating with people who think differently than you, takes a lot of effort online, because there are so many trolls and others baiting you into defending a position without putting any effort to explain their own.

So yeah, heavy moderation is an unfortunate necessity in some forums.

I don't see it as an unfortunate thing for private spaces. It's very natural, and realistically the span of opinions where you can get productive dialogue going between people is not infinite. You're never going to get any useful discussion from, say, anarchists and neo-nazis talking to each other.

That's only because the most powerful reddit moderators are basically corrupt dictators.

It's not just reddit, though - if you're going to start moderating, you have a meta-problem to address which is what to do about opinionated moderators.

It also puts the moderator under pressure. User will start ushering demands what you should ban. In worst case law enforcement too.

I don't really understand why people waste so much time getting something removed instead of just reading something else, but there are whole communities that live for banning others by now.

In a larger legal scope platforms are under heavy scrutiny by moral busybodies right now.

All mods are opinionated. They're either humans, or bots programmed by humans. I don't see why you're trying to deny humanity to moderators.

All judges are opinionated. They're humans. I don't see why you're trying to deny humanity to judges.

Read the above and reconsider if your argument makes sense. It stands to reason that if you have any position of "power," even if it's just "random internet moderator," you should at least try to be fair, consistent, and reasonable.