That's a nice phrasing but it doesn't hold up to what I've seen at all. Everyone has a different definition of what is "necessary" and anyone that gets (shadow-)banned is going to scream "Censorship!". I've moderated communities and watched this happen enough times to know.
There simply is no objective way to handle it, it's always going to subjective and there will always be false positives. The alternative is a hellscape.
HN has rules it adheres to but if someone finds a loophole or continues to walk "right up to the line" they probably aren't going to be around for long. I tried moderating a community once completely to the "letter of the law" and it turned out horribly. People abused that and drove off people who were kind and had interesting things to contribute. What was left was a few people who stuck it out and a bunch of trolls who knew they could get away with it.
When defining a rule based system, remember the problem space is enormous, potentially even unbounded. As your number of rules grow the number of conflicting rules will increase.
Then there are some things like politics that low temperature conversations are near impossible in already...
In addition, not every discussion/content belongs everywhere. I've seen "well if people upvote it then they like it and it should stay" argument made before and I've also seen it fail. Memes, jokes, or the more extreme example, porn, might get upvotes but that doesn't mean it belongs in a certain community. That's not to say any of those things are bad or don't have a place but not every place needs to cater to or allow them.
Some people want spaces to hang out that don't discuss politics and/or want to stay laser-focused on a certain topic and that's ok but some people see that and scream "censorship!". What it really comes down to is that person wants to say whatever _they_ want to say, but they certainly don't want a real "free speech zone" because that would drive them away too in the end. No, they want an exception to the rule for themselves and when they don't get it they cry foul.
Why is it automatically impossible for a set of moderation rules to be as rigorous and logically correct?
Unless you're planning to demand your users only use one particular language only a well defined subset of it.
Using a theory as a comparison is generally a pretty poor example as we have no universal theory that defines everything, instead they are targeted at only a small slice of 'something'. Language has a larger scope than that.
Can you demonstrate why this is the case?
Bad = Bad
Bad = Good
There you go, language is logically inconsistent.
I think this kind of reads like a rant, so I apologise for the wording and the formatting. My thoughts are not entirely clear and structured on the topic so I can't do any better right now.
HN is not, and they can certainly ban what they want.
Hard disagree on the arbitrary part. What's considered "intellectual" or "curious conversation" depends entirely on dang's personal preference.
For example every time a Steve Jobs thread is posted, there inevitably are two major themes:
1. People fawning over how great a leader Steve allegedly was, despite his flaws
2. People going on about how Steve was a massive douchebag, in spite of his success with Apple
Neither of those topics are interesting, novel, or intellectually gratifying but only #2 is reliably censored by dang. CEO worship is on-topic here but criticism of those CEOs is apparently "not interesting".
If you've ever ran a site of any size you will eventually find out there are some discussions that lead to a plethora of moderative actions because the user base (or trolls in it) cannot behave and disrupt the community. And while this may be unfair to you, a completely reasonable person capable of handling polite online discussion, the unreasonable discussions are unfair to those who do not want a flame war ever 3 post, and unfair to the administrative burden the moderators must shoulder.
How are you determining dang is taking action rather than user downvotes and flags? Can you provide some examples?
That is what I kept reading from "free speech advocates", especially regarding Twitter etc. - those same people are now largely either silent or actively cheering on the same happening in regards to the other side right now. This is the fatal flaw with this definition: "not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily" does not mean the same thing to all people, and it seems that the counter-mainstream doesn't give the mainstream more leeway. So is there some way this could be done without the pendulum just swinging fully the opposite way?
For example, banning someone only for not liking their views is obviously legal and permitted almost everywhere, but a site/forum doing that doesn't adhere to the principles of free speech then. Which they don't necessarily have to do, but that's what free speech advocates are fighting for - for more places to adopt the conduct of not doing that.