For the record, I think CF and everybody else are well within their rights to drop KF, and the place is a cesspit. I'm very firmly 'Team Nobody' here.

And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution?

And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.

I don't think we would. This just feels to me like a classic "young people disagree with me" narrative that is so easy to create in one's mind. If anything, I'd expect the folks who've been around long enough to really see the state use its power to absolutely crush queer people with brutal violence against its own longstanding stated principles to be more aware that this isn't the sort of trade you can make.

Did you ever use IRC? I think about the conversations that went on in #freenode, and compared to the Discord servers I see today their discussions are absolutely sterile. "Off topic" channels in Discord servers tend to amount to rigorously moderated firehoses of memes and benign discourse, compared to IRC's loosely-attended miasma of porno, MTV music videos and 3-hour long conference talks. You might be able to argue that the signal:noise ratio improved over the years, but people's idea of netiquette certainly changed along with it.

Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...

I don't really understand the relevance here. The claim above, as I understood it, was that older queer people would be more cautious around supporting actions taken against unsavory speech because they remember being viciously targeted via those same means and fear them being used against their community once again.

I'm saying that I have zero confidence in the state or broader society to actually hold consistent principles when it comes to the treatment of oppressed minorities and that defending KF won't help one iota if the state decides to attack gay people and that the older generation of gay people know this very deeply since their original oppression by the state was not done in accordance to it's supposed principles.

This has nothing to do with internet forums of the past being full of unmoderated noisy content.

This is going to be a subjective broad statement based on my experience of using the Internet for 20 years and growing up in the West: I think your thought experiment holds water. I think the older generations (30-35+) just care about being accepted by society for who they are and not denied anything everyone else has (jobs, housing, using the swimming pool, etc.). I think it is the younger generations who don't want just acceptance but almost a totalitarian adherence to their world view. This is where we get the majority of content around issues and it becomes non-negotiable as we've seen from other comments in this thread around medication. I still believe the most extreme voices are the ones that are the loudest.