We’ve gone to our own corner here on Hacker News. And yet there’s moderation to keep discussion on-topic and respectful. In my estimation you likely choose to participate in this corner of the Internet because of the moderation of both link submissions and comments. Without it, HN would devolve into a cesspool over time like every other attempt at unmoderated forums that’s been tried. Well-meaning participants would be driven out by trolls, spammers, and angry people with an axe to grind.
There is shadow banning on HN and I disagree with it, but I should be able to make the above generalisation of why HN seems to work with less moderation than expected.
On sites like 4chan, there is some moderation, but again, the few interesting comments that exist get automatically highlighted by the engagement that occurs within the page. Moderation does not allow this to exist, census does. Moderation just helps but I argue the site would work without it, and thats how the internet used to work. Even newgroups that used the wrong mechanic to handle consensus based uploading, and suffered from spam , had content that was good and easy to find, without any moderation that I could see.
The Internet might have seemed “better” back then and like it didn’t need moderation. From many people’s perspective it probably was. But that was likely a function of the reality that most people on the Internet at the time had a lot in common with one another.
We don’t get the benefit of that luxury today.
There was a greater diversity of social gathering places.
Now -there's facebook, twitter, reddit and HN.
Moderation has ALWAYS been a factor and that's not what made the old internet better.
What made the old internet better was that it was open and more diverse (in terms of viewpoint and choices). The new internet is basically (on a social level) a few social media corporations which are becoming increasingly sterile.
