zlacker

> It seems to me that the presence of that community on your site has effects that spread beyond the community itself, it shapes the way people interact even outside the soft-banned subreddit.

This is sort of talking around an argument. You could say the same thing about a subreddit dedicated to re-electing a local alderman because of his policy on the maintenance of public parks. Speech is meant to inform, or to affect change.

The question is whether you're going to use an online annoyance argument to moderate controversy on a platform. If the justification for why you're going to moderate speech is that people who are not annoyed by that speech might react to it, you've moved squarely into making "genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear."

>>pessim+(OP)
Right, so Scott presents this alternative MVP version of "moderation", and implies that it is sufficient to satisfy the goal of "ensuring that your customers like using your product". And that therefore efforts beyond that MVP land you into "censorship".

My point is that the actions he categorizes as "moderation" are in fact not sufficient to achieve the goal. Thus, even a platform who is purely concerned with providing a service will need to undertake actions he categorizes as "censorship" (or at least would have to come up with some unknown new system of moderation, since the one he proposes is insufficient).