> It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content
Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators?
The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would split into a bunch of 8chans, and a bunch of TV stations, with nothing in-between. If you care about free expression, making businesses scared of user content is counterproductive.
Depends what you mean by "a forum like HN". Before HN the main geek watering hole was Slashdot, which famously never censored content and fought strongly against attempts to force it to do so.
Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.
You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.
In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.
The idea that it's OK to implement an algorithm that takes some user's input to censor posts but it's not OK to do so directly seems like it skirts the central question.
If I have upvotes and downvotes, weighted the way I like, and I limit who can get an account in the first place, I can probably achieve the speech outcome I want relatively easily "without" human intervention.
Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators?
The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would split into a bunch of 8chans, and a bunch of TV stations, with nothing in-between. If you care about free expression, making businesses scared of user content is counterproductive.