Imgur's community was in revolt

On your own site or services? Of course.

I don’t want to host that content, though. That’s also my right.

As I discovered on the early days on Reddit, I don’t even want to be on a site where content is a free-for-all because you could go from scrolling through programming topics to encountering sexualized imagery of minors by scrolling if you weren’t careful.

This is the problem with every hardcore free speech platform: They attract the people who only come to post that content, while everyone else who doesn’t want to see it starts leaving. Then after some time, the majority of your content is catering to those niches.

On the other hand, the presence of that kind of content in other subreddits functioned as a highly-effective anti-normie filter on the rest of the site. It kept the kind of people who shit up Twitter away.

This is a prisoner’s dilemma situation. You don’t want to host that content, which is your right. And neither does anyone else. So every place that does try ends up swamped with the undesirables and either stops trying, goes bust, or turns into a poisonous swamp. And thus all the “yes but not here” people collectively end up enforcing a degree of censorship beyond what the law actually requires, or (in other cases) effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold (thus effectively forcing that part of society to turn into a poisonous swamp).

(Neutral example: at some point in the past the clinics around me started requiring appointments to come in for doctor-prescribed tests. Recently, the closest one did that too, saying that they were the only one remaining and ended up being overloaded with all the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t make an appointment. And thus we’re all worse off now.)

It seems like you view free speech as "everyone should be provided a platform to speak their mind", more or less. With that view, what you speak of is arguably a problem, sure.

My view of free speech is simply: the government shouldn't arrest you for publishing most things (with only certain mostly-well-defined exceptions). If there are views which are not illegal but which no platform will let you publish, I really don't see the problem. If enough people share those views they can get together and make their own platform. It's not even hard to make a platform anymore, anyone can buy a domain and set up nginx on a raspberry pi.

Freedom from government persecution on the basis of speech is extremely important to me (again, with exceptions). Freedom to publish unsavoury-but-legal content on other people's platforms is completely unimportant to me.

> effectively erasing opinions that a fair part of society does hold

There is no widespread opinion that does not have countless corresponding platforms to share it.

I guarantee you cannot find an opinion that cannot be shared on at least one of the major social media platforms right now.

This extinction of free speech does not happen.

I was there and I couldn't disagree more.

I see more parallels between the people who thrived in the early Reddit cesspool era and the same people who are spreading culture wars, misinfo, and other garbage on Twitter.

The early days of Reddit were a haven for culture war and misinfo people.

That's what he said: anti-normie.

> started requiring appointments

I fear we're headed this way generally. There's a kind of person who likes to plan everything ahead of time. As we hit capacity limits (e.g. overtourism), those planners are going to book all the available capacity. We're going to either have to adapt to be like them, or be locked out of experiences.

I'm very not happy about it.

That type mostly only wants the most shrinkwrapped and commercialized experiences.

Do something unique, something new, something odd. You won't have any competition from ahead bookers and you can have experiences they'll never imagine.

I would submit that many essential things are shrink wrapped and commercialized (fantastic phrase, by the way).

It’s not just the planners either. It’s the people who are unreasonable and it’s the people who lack any external center of concern. By way of example: it used to be easy to get in touch with my physician. As the practice she works for has grown, they’ve made it all but impossible for physicians and patients to have a conversation privately and without an intermediary, except when you’re in the exam room or a physician places an outgoing call.

As their practice grew, so too did the number of people who believed they should or could (defensibly) go directly to their doctor about every little thing. People made unreasonable demands. So the practice reacted to protect the physicians at the cost of their accessibility to patients, other than booking a visit.

I’ve never understood the “everyone is entitled to have their voice heard by the masses” idea.

It’s never been true before, let alone realistic. It’s only with the past several decades of networked computing that humans have been able to so vastly amplify the reach of an individual or group opinion.

Just because it’s easier than ever to publish speech doesn’t make having one’s speech published any kind of right.