The hidden piece of the puzzle here is that objectionable speech pushes regular speech out.
Most users don't want to wade through toxicity to get to signal. If they're discussing a topic of interest, say baking, and someone comes in and starts ranting on how a vast global conspiracy made up of surprisingly-homogeneous ethnicity given its global scale is pushing up the price of yeast to weaken the market for white bread, either the moderators squelch that noise or people who want to talk about baking go somewhere else to do it.
Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.
> Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.
This is true, but unfortunately the same mistakes keep being made because people don't pay attention to the history of the internet or didn't grow up during that era. We've known that completely unfettered discussion leads to self destruction since the Usenet era. But the lessons aren't heeded or ignored, so we get people that either stay ignorant or learn the hard way.
Most users don't want to wade through toxicity to get to signal. If they're discussing a topic of interest, say baking, and someone comes in and starts ranting on how a vast global conspiracy made up of surprisingly-homogeneous ethnicity given its global scale is pushing up the price of yeast to weaken the market for white bread, either the moderators squelch that noise or people who want to talk about baking go somewhere else to do it.
Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.