Moderators were initially tasked with keeping threads on topic, enforcing predefined community standards, and parsing irrelevant detractors.
Dark patterns are now mostly just used to manipulate people, and attenuate conduct to fall into line with group think biases. This policy drives up engagement, traffic, and profits.
Most truly smart people I met, were often rather prickly characters more concerned with data than being popular. ;)
That is a rather naive slogan to be repeating in 2022.
Once your servers become the de facto public square, we absolutely get to complain. Not even talking about how your server is running on top of a huge amount of infrastructure that was created by our society, enabled by principles and laws that have been discovered and refined across generations. Your server does not exist in a vacuum.
Democracy requires a healthy public square to survive and thrive, and that is more important than some overly simplistic notion of private property.
Twitter ? It's far from a public square, even in the US (outside of the US it barely exists)
Also, if an online public square is a pre requisite for democracy: it should be a public utility, not something owned by a company who's incentive are diametrically opposed to the interests of the users
I'm sorry but you do not know what you are talking about.
Big claim...
Look at the stats, how can it be a democracy pre requisite and a public square when not even 10% of your country's population is on it ? (and probably 30% of these are bots, and another 30% are inactive)
It's an online bubble of polarised people looking for attention, not a public square and not representative of anything