Actually, no, reasonable people do not want either platforms or governments to moderate content.
Who defines what "problematic content" is?
Who defines what "problematic content" is?
YC is free to censor on their own platform, the only issue is when the government is involved in censoring speech.
Anyway my point was "problematic content" is often used as a buzzword by censorship happy people, and ends up being synonymous with "something I disagree with." We have just literally seen the real life consequences of pushing for censorship — that it will eventually be used against speech that one agrees with — and nobody quite seems to care.
There are platforms that have much less strict standards with regards to that - yet you consider this the more agreeable platform. Maybe the reason is that it’s actually nicer to have a conversation in a place where you don’t need to deal with an asshole that starts yelling and insulting everyone at the table.
Think about this in real life: would you want to frequent a place where the loudest asshole gets to insult everyone present or would you rather go to a bar where at some point the Barkeeper steps in and sorts things out?
The modern web example of your bar scenario is more like this: the bartender doesn't want to hear [opposing political/societal issue opinion] at the bar and starts kicking out everyone he disagrees with. The kicked out people go start their own bar. Now there's two neighboring bars, MAGABar and LibBar; customers are automatically filtered into attending either bar by an algorithm. If you say anything that the bartender disagrees with, you're permanently banned. The fun part is that you can be permanently banned from BOTH bars if your viewpoints don't fall in line 100% with what the bartender wants to hear.
Oh and you can't go to TechBar anymore either, the bartender heard you said something critical of furries at another bar, so now you're banned and not allowed to talk about computers.
> If there is, it's certainly not a profitable product.
I think this is the main issue: that we walled up our discussion plazas to make them 'profitable products'.
I know I am a bit of an idealist here, but I miss the old-timey usenet, basically an agora where you could filter yourself (with the appropriately-called killfile), and which was not controlled by one institution alone). I had some hope with federated systems - but these are often built with censorship mechanisms written right into it, and again give operators too much influence on what their users may or may not see.
I remember the time when it was en vouge for subreddits to ban people for participating in subreddits they personally disagree with (automated, regardless of how that participation took place).
You cannot have a free exchange of ideas with a centralised thought police. You can only have truly free communication if you yourself decide what you read, and what you block out.
For bigger platforms which operate as a public forum I think the case is stronger for weak moderation, but even in those situations a bad faith actor (say perhaps a state or corporate actor with a lot of money to blow on bots) can completely undermine the purpose of those forums. I really can't imagine how a transparent moderation policy in such a situation isn't at least practically useful. In the end you cannot have a free exchange of ideas if some parties are intentionally manipulating, trolling, or flooding the zone of exchange.
Congress isn't just a free for all of people yelling at eachother. There are rules, not to moderate free speech, but to just make hundreds of people cooperating a possibility.
I'm glad you're both a reasonable person, and available to identify all others, so that the set of reasonable people want the same thing.