It's not the only reason. Without any moderation, sites would degenerate into cesspools that only cesspool dwellers would want to visit. Few site owners want their properties to be cesspools.
Or course they now all demand to show you "recommended" content and with that take on the responsibly of how "pleasant" that recommended content is.
Where did they do this? I bet few people truly know. My personal guess it's because injected ads and promoted content logged to out of place between your friends posts whereas there is little difference between ads and most popular posts.
What I propose is that the email host preserves all emails sent to you, but puts them in your spam folder if it considers so. Moreover, I should be able to disable that and let my email client to do spam filtering on the rules I make.
And maybe the owners just want to keep that sweet fascist option open.
Which is turn makes it harder to non-obviously put your hand on the scales and insert paid content into high visibility feeds.
If TikTok inserts a well-matched piece of paid content into a feed, who would even recognize?
If HN inserts a piece of paid content onto the front page, people tend to notice.
HN has something similar to "paid" content: YC alum companies are allowed to post hiring notices that end up on the front page, and decay down the page according to a pre-determined algorithm. They're obvious in that you can't comment or vote on them, but HN does allow them to be hidden. I think that's the right way to do things; if HN allowed YC companies to post on the front page, and made it look like they were regular posts that got organically upvoted, it would reduce my trust in HN.
Any social media platform that puts paid content in a feed, while trying to make it look like regular content, would also lose my trust.
We're looking at 2 different moderation processes.
Daddy
Voting
There is no necessary connection that I can see.
If one wants to wade through the degenerate cesspool of content, they'd have that option. If one wants to only see fluffy non-hateful things, they could subscribe to moderation feeds that achieve that.
The notion that we can impose a single perspective of "good content" and "bad content" onto millions of people, with different perspectives, is simply asinine.
If you, as a US individual, express the opinion that "I do not like post with unique ID X on platform Y because of reasons a,b,c", that would be protected speech. A moderation feed would be equivalent to a series of such statements.
If other users decide to subscribe to your moderation feed, and have matching posts automatically hidden, that would specifically be the choice of that individual user, and not a private company.
One of the greatest scams governments around the world have managed to pull is making "free speech" a politically partisan issue. There are two sides to it though, but it's not conservative vs. liberal, it's the common people vs. governments and corporations.
That's moderation. Both because they are actively excluding certain content, but also because 'porn' can be subjective and so decisions have to be made about what does and does not qualify.
The huge Aimee Challenor thing, that lead to people being banned anywhere the name was uttered is just the super high profile example I know, i'm sure reddit users would be able to show more smaller cases.
Just want to make it clear, I'm not claiming this control is good or bad, there are good reasons for and against moderation, but reddit is not even close to a free for all.
[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-aimee-knight-challenor-fired...
That's not even remotely gray, it's both a political statement and a "cesspool comment"; you're suggesting a false dichotomy.
The definition of political used by the populace is almost always the narrow subset of societal/cultural fights that are actively being argued. Generally speaking these arguments are headed by politicians.
There is also a space in the definition for arguments directly impact the structure/scope of the government. Although this may be separate enough that it may warrant being considered a second definition instead of an additional category within the first definition.
If I'm running a car forum, I should be able to ban pro-Nazi rhetoric if I want, regardless of whether I find it offensive or merely technically off topic. Not every space on the internet needs to be /pol/.
Section 230 was an unusually great piece of internet legislation, and it's not great to see it start to crumble with these new changes. Just let every site be its own site.