It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!
Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc.
But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality.
It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform.
Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's finances, moderation or anything... Wikipedia attract more need rage than any of them.
Imo, this is the biggest barrier to freedom online. Freedom and transparency make people insanely critical and hostile.
Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism right afterwards.
> Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy.
Most of Wikipedia's moderation is done by unpaid volunteers, sans legal issues which are handled by WMF via executive actions. They run a dead simple tech stack, with most being served out of highly optimized caches.
Wikipedia is unlike the original Wikiwiki Web (https://wiki.c2.com/) which had discussion threads on the same page as articles, and feels more like a social network. On this page:
https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks
it explains that things work because it's easy to roll back to the previous version, a feature that is shared by Wikipedia.
First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff.
Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy.
Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.