I really don't get why so many posts need to be removed. Other than bullying and harassment, isn't that what the vote buttons are for?
Newspapers losing control over the narrative over the last 15 years have been "extremely dangerous for our democracy" and it's no surprise politicians are pushing back against Internet in an attempt to regain the control. At the moment it seems impossible to predict what the future will look like, but it doesn't look promising in my view.
In other words, the problem is states. If you irrevocably delegate your decision making to a representative government as is presumed in the idea of the "social contract", that government becomes its own entity as a state and must establish a system of domination against its subjects to maintain itself. Anyone seeking to change or abolish it, whether one of its subjects or as a foreign state, must be seen as hostile and be contained or eliminated. We can discuss whether that is good or bad but it seems contradictory to want a powerful state but not want it to have power.
That kind of encryption can even be done with a pen and paper.
Encryption ban is unenforceable.
You can't ban math.
Google and Microsoft made a solution that scans user files for illegal stuff, but it can be easily defeated by simply uploading a password protected archive.
We've already had people being arrested/charged for private gatherings among a small number of friends just because the government(s) decided to impose arbitrary restrictions on who you could meet. We are also seening more and more arrests and fines for public speech that happens to offend someone. You can bet that once the capability is there this will eventually also happen with private digital communications.
For now. People who grew up before the internet are limited and non-renewable.
On traditional forums threads could be merged together - which was often confusing but it at least allowed comments made up to that point to be retained. Reddit doesn't seem to have that functionality (or at least I've never seen it).
But its also not always uncontroversial what should and shouldn't be merged. E.g. this allows moderators to select the article most favorable to their views and then give it all the comments, effectively boosting one viewpoint while hiding others.
Any insufficiently moderated subreddit quickly devolves into spam, low effort content and memes. And when big events happen you'll have 20 people submitting the same thing, then 15 follow-up posts about "Why am I being censored?"
Reddit is kinda crap at deduplication. It compares URLs exactly, and still doesn't know that youtube.com and youtu.be are the same place, or that the junk appended to a youtube URL is mostly irrelevant.
Any sufficiently large subreddit, regardless of moderation. Once a subreddit reaches critical mass, its inundated with low quality posts as mentioned. One can argue that is due to poor moderation, which would be part of it, but I find it’s mostly just the Reddit “culture” to create stale memes of the same formats but with subreddit-specific things tacked on, instead of interesting discussion.
The only times I don’t see this is in subreddits where posting is reserved to people who have to prove their worth in some degree, which naturally isn’t an ideal system either.
Of course Voat promoting itself as a "free speech alternative to reddit" predictably led to it mostly attracting those affected by the reddit moderation policies, which led to them becoming exactly what reddit wanted to avoid and predictably failing eventually.