Free is a difficult word, at some point in a free speech system you have two people screaming at the top of their lungs and no one is getting heard. Or you have one person trying to argue a point and a gang of other users calling them a "faggot". Or someone sliding the thread with something like "stoooooooop infoooorming meeeeeeeeeeeee" . Both true stories in my recent history.

But anyone using speech to silence other speech is not speaking freely, they are speaking to limit the free speech of someone else.

None of this works without moderation. The people who do not want free speech, which are the most powerful, well-funded, autocratic, plutocratic, tyrannical people in the world, want to control the platform, the servers, the ownership, the moderators, and then ultimately the user base. Then the databases so they can know who said what, when, long after the site is abandonded.

We have seen this happen, over and over. I saw this problem coming in the early 2000s, I was at one point obsessed with it.

How would anyone think internet debating would work without fair algorithms and fair moderators? I predicted what actually happened, and I had to give up on my work to create alternatives because it was more than any one person could do, and the hundreds of other peoeple at the time I spoke to(and I wrote al gore and noam chomsky...) were just unwilling to even consider that it wouldn't just all work out.

What it boils down to is that operating a site like saidit in such a way it does not get taken over by forces that want to destroy it and use it for propaganda, is difficult and takes time. And it takes a certain kind of very fair, very knowledgeable person in the moderation chair.

And I have read the same story over and over again in dozens of communities, Raddle, reddit subs, chans, eztv, the actual police and military(JIDF...CCP) will spend 24/7 effort to take over the mod spots, over years, until they do. They will go to extreme lengths to make any debate over the admin rights and mod rights so bonkers, so extended, so tiring, that no one can read it. They will literally wear you down, and no volunteer can withstand it. Volunteers are in a way doing it for fun, edification, learning, community service, but the forces against free speech ruin all of that for them until they give up and the sub becomes a joke. The conspiracy about r/conspiracy is so far off the meta charts....

So I said in 2002, seeing this coming, and I was a much less effective writer than I am now, and now I have seen decades of this happening, and how dead(and hostile, full of nonsense) the internet is as a result) that this job of internet moderation and mediation is a real, actual job. Actual work. It will not ever succeed with a volunteer effort, especially an anon one. Just look at things like the Fram debates over at wikipedia, who can even follow that? The entire discussion is over what kind of organization is even being appealed to, and the "wikimedia foundation" and wiki corporate and jimmy wales have completely failed to solve this issue, with the most dedicated volunteer editing base(including phillip cross...) and millions of dollars.

Or look at .org and ethos capital, the "multi stake holder" chimera of orgs who claim to somehow kindof operate in the public interest, and how this is just being bought out wholesale which will give a zionist corporation veto power over every .org domain.

The cops and militaries and plutocrats of the world know that moderation and administration of intellectual content is a job and they are paying people to spend years taking these roles over, making a billion boutique controlled opposition sites like raddle and slug, why are we civilians so far behind?

Do you really think the debate pyramid idea is going to scale? Do you really think they havent started to degrade and take over here? (they have) Or that people will buy into this if there isnt something operationally different?

Imagine a utopic world that has done away with internal war, something like the start trek federation. Or even something so simple as a ship board computer on a non-autocratic ship run democratically. The operation of the debate computer in such a way it isnt gamed is critical to any idea of democracy. And the moderation of that server is critical to any idea of democracy.

But all of the billion dollar "democracy" funds like Tides and the NPR funding endowments have spent the last 20 years pretending the critical efforts of digital democracy can be a mostly volunteer effort.

Now we sit at home, everyone dreaming of the perfect stay at home job, stay at home jobs being actually critical perhaps to the entire survival of the economy, and our internet is full of disinformation that is also threatening not just the economy but our safety, and I am the only one writing about what it might look like for these idiotic aspects of the current internet were flipped.

What if moderators weren't anon and were vetted not to be cops/military and what if they were paid for their work? How would that look? How would you set it up? I have some ideas, some of them are in my Expanded Definitions book and some are in Mental Self Defense https://leanpub.com/mentalselfdefense https://leanpub.com/expandeddefinitions

Fact is, the state and corporation will never, ever give us a "free speech" platform outside of their control and they will always try to destroy it, subvert it while giving the illusion of freedom(always, always the trick of tyranny).

And anything that is not capable of resisting these forces is just another tasteless joke on r/conspiracy.