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.
Outside the US this problem typically gets even worse. For one, why is your country depending on a (generally) US company for its freedom of speech? And two, outside the US freedom of speech laws are typically significantly different than the US model.