Hacker News Reader

> Why would I want to join an online discussion forum where free thought isn't welcome?

Every community has ideas about what's right and wrong, and there will always be people who disagree. Moderation will always be required because that's just the nature of communities.

> Politics aside - I wonder if it would be possible to create an instance focused on free speech, without automatically attracting all the worst people?

To the point I just made: no, it's not possible refrain from moderating a community and then avoid having people there who engage in behavior you don't like. If your definition of "free speech" includes a complete lack of moderation, then you'll always run into this problem.

> as a person who grew up in a country ruined by "anti-capitalism"

Would you be willing to name this county?

You seem to place authoritarianism and capitalism on opposite ends of some spectrum, but they're unrelated. Russia, for example, is both authoritarian and capitalist.

Capitalism != individual freedom != democracy. Those are all separate axes.

> Having "leftist" in the description makes people (at least myself) automatically jump to the conclusion that one can get cancelled/banned/deplatformed for posting any thought or argument that disagrees with the mainstream. I'm not a conservative or anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but this culture really creeps me out.

Outside of maybe 8chan, what is a community that won't ban you for saying something they find harmful? Left/right/liberal/conservative communities all have this.

It's totally fine if a self-described left-leaning community is not for you, but there's nothing weird or creepy about it.

One way in which capitalism is closer to individual freedom is the notion of voluntary transactions between two parties. That is what ultimately makes up the market dynamic of supply and demand. There are some limits to this - for example with monopolies - but in the typical case I think this reasoning holds.