It's proof of the old adage : the best possible government is a benign dictator.

What kind of free speech is not allowed? What can’t you say right now that you feel should?

Category 1 from Yishan's thread, spam, obviously isn't allowed. But also thinking about house general framework of it all coming down to signal vs noise, most "noise" gets heavily punished on here. Reddit-style jokes frequently end in the light greys or even dead. I had my account shadow-banned over a decade ago because I made a penis joke and thought people didn't get the joke.

Free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever, wherever, without any repercussions. It solely means the government can't restrict your expression. On a private platform you abide their rules.

You seem to be conflating the general principles of free speech with the specific protections defined by the US first amendment.

There are no "general principles of free speech," there are conflicting principles over which people constantly disagree.

What now? You’re suggesting that the removal of the word “general” turns it into a concept that can exist and be disagreed upon? There can’t be conflicting general principles of free speech over which people consistently disagree? What a bizarre correction.

Well, no. Free Speech is an idea, far more expansive than the law as written in the US constitution, or many other countries and their respective law of the land/documents.

Free Speech does mean what you describe it not as. But there is no legal body to punish you for violating the principle. It is similar to 'primum non nocere', translated roughly to 'do no harm', extremely common in medicine and something you may see alongside the 'Hippocratic Oath'. You can be in violation of that principle or the oath at any time, some people even get fired for violating either as a pretext to malpractice. Some even argue that it is quite impossible to abide by this principle, and yet, it is something many people take on as responsibility everyday all across the globe.

I won't argue about websites and their rules, they have their own set of principles and violate plenty of others, sometimes they even violate their own principles. But Free Speech is not just the law and interactions one may have with their government.

Where are the people arguing about Donald Trump? Where are the people promoting dodgy cryptocurrencies? Where are the people arguing about fighting duck-sized horses? Where's the Ask HN asking for TV show recommendations?

I think most posts are short lived so they drop off quickly and people move on to new content. I think a lot of folks miss a lot of activity that way. I know I miss a bunch. And if you miss the zeitgeist it doesn’t matter what you say cause nobody will reply.

The twitter retweet constantly amplifies and the tweets are centered around an account vs a post.

Reddit should behave similarly but I think subreddit topics stick longer.

Very good point about the "fog of war". If HN had a reply-notification feature, it would probably look differently. Every now and then someone builds a notification feature as an external service. I wonder if you can measure change in the behavior of people before and after they've started using it?

Of course, that also soft-forces everyone to move on. Once a thread is a day or two old, you can still reply, but the person you've replied to will probably not read it.

There's also the fact that there's no alerts about people replying to you or commenting on your posts. You have to explicitly go into your profile, click comments, and then you can see if anyone has said anything to you.

This drastically increases time between messages on a topic, lets people cool off, and lets a topic naturally die down.