Reddit, itself, is, or at least used to be, a variety of diverse communities. I don't care about either /r/FatPeopleHate or /r/FatPeopleLove I don't consider myself a part of those communities. I subscribe to subreddits I want to track, and I am not a member of the ones that I don't.

Surely people on the disagreeable side of the psychological spectrum will gravitate towards some communities and people on the opposite side of that spectrum will gravitate towards other communities. Some communities are cross-cutting, and so have to be moderated in a different way altogether (which Reddit already accommodates). Other than that, communities have their own social protocols. Creating blanket rules / bans / restrictions across communities restricts the organic nature of human interaction and hamstrings it in a rather depressing way.

Many problems arise in the battle for "front page" or "trending" screens that try to blend content from multiple communities and invite competition or "raids" or what have you from opposing sides. Personally I hate such things, I have no desire to be manipulated by them and use browser extensions to block them. But given that they exist, it's again mainly a moderation / preferences problem. Give the control to the user over what they want to see.

In my experience, this depends on the community size.

In a small community, "platforming" assholes (rather than "deplatforming" them) may act to retain the assholes as users (where they would otherwise leave for lack of platform); and then those asshole-users, since they're already there, may also interact in other, non-quarantined subforums on the site — to other users' detriment.

In a large community (society, really), e.g. Reddit or Twitter, the asshole-users are going to stick around either way, since people have multiple interests, and the site likely already gives them many other things they want besides just "a plaform to talk about their asshole opinions on." They weren't there primarily to be assholes; they just are assholes, but are going to stick around either way.

So, for large sites, the only real decision you're making by quarantining vs banning a certain sub-community that's full of assholes (rather than doing active moderation of certain discussion topics, regardless of where they occur) is whether the asshole-users' conversations mostly end up occurring in the quarantined forum, or spread out across the rest of the site where they can't be hidden.

It's a bit like prostitution regulation. Prostitution is going to happen in a city no matter what; it's just a question of whether such activity is "legible" or "illegible" to city government. Some cities choose to have an explicitly-designated red-light district and licensing for sex workers; these cities at least ensure that any activity associated with prostitution — e.g. human trafficking, gang violence, etc — occurs mostly within that district, where police presence can be focused. Most cities, though, choose to "protect their image" by having no such district. This option does not result in less prostitution; it only hides it throughout the city, making police investigation of crimes related to sex work much less likely to be reported, and much more difficult to investigate.

When asked why, the first reason is he uses Substack and they don't offer this as a feature, and when he was on his own self-hosted site, he didn't have the technical skill to implement it himself. But then he says that even if he could, he wouldn't, because he wants his community to reflect a certain ethos and character that creates a community he actually wants to be a part of.

How he doesn't see the contradiction here, I don't know. But this gets at the core of the issue. Virtually nobody actually wants a free-for-all, even one that is opt-in. But whereas some blogger with a devoted following is allowed the freedom to cultivate his garden, as he has described it in the past, when you get as big as Twitter, the larger public starts to feel like it's their community and they should get to decide, not the owners, or that it's even so big as to be this "de facto public square" people keep calling it, and now it has to just follow the same rules as a government, even though it is a private platform owned by people with their own preferences for what they think the character of the platform should be.

The only fairly large platform I can ever think of that really did adopt the more or less anything that won't get us shut down by the FBI is fair game policy is 4Chan. But if everyone who is so hung up on Twitter being too restrictive is mad about Twitter's policies, 4Chan still exists. Why not just go there? You can't even say it doesn't have reach. There are plenty of users there. Meaningful real world movements have started there. The only thing you lose is the real news doesn't follow and write about 4Chan nearly as much as they do Twitter.

This is sort of talking around an argument. You could say the same thing about a subreddit dedicated to re-electing a local alderman because of his policy on the maintenance of public parks. Speech is meant to inform, or to affect change.

The question is whether you're going to use an online annoyance argument to moderate controversy on a platform. If the justification for why you're going to moderate speech is that people who are not annoyed by that speech might react to it, you've moved squarely into making "genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear."

My point is that the actions he categorizes as "moderation" are in fact not sufficient to achieve the goal. Thus, even a platform who is purely concerned with providing a service will need to undertake actions he categorizes as "censorship" (or at least would have to come up with some unknown new system of moderation, since the one he proposes is insufficient).