I wrestle with this, I really do. Part of the way forward for me and part of the problem at the same time is finding consistency in the application of principles. I can acknowledge change over time in how I see this issue, but that change could be described as hypocrisy. I know when I first heard about and began to really get into Reddit, I was very much in the let the upvotes decide camp and felt it aligned with my generally liberal even leftist views. To begin to apply caveats to this idea should seem then to be a back step and admission that I don't fully believe in democratic values or equal rights to beliefs and opinions.

But over time I've tried to reconcile this with certain emerging realities. Especially those brought about by the nature of the internet in particular. People will often bring up things like Nazis as their go-to example of why you should embrace moderation and intervention in open forums. It's a pretty good example because they're a fairly widely held archetype of an intolerable world view that almost everyone agrees they wouldn't endorse, which is a useful extreme in any discussion on this topic even if a tired one. But one can always ask, "surely then, these Nazis would be a marginal and irrelevant influence? There's no need to sacrifice the purity of our dedication to open discussion by intervening to banish such views on internet forums, the users and voting systems will do it, and if they don't, then maybe it's what 'the people' wanted after all?" Well sure, but this theoretical approach ignores realities such as the mechanisms that will be used to push this fringe and near universally reviled set of ideas to the mainstream fore. The machinery of the internet allows for malicious actors not to just put out their views on a virtual speaker's corner, but infect and flood a forum and artificially distort it in to basically, a nazi forum. They're not honest idealists trying to sell their relatively unpopular wares in the market of ideas, they're walking around pushing everyone else's stalls over or surreptitiously supplanting their own materials in to everyone else's shop front. In a more literal sense they'll use bots, they'll use alts, they'll brigade, they'll insert Nazism in to every topic where it's not relevant, they'll organise together and purposefully distort voting for posts by automated means or just by a perverse dedication to poisoning the well by consistently voting on ideology rather than interest. They'll use open hostility to make a place generally unpleasant enough to be around that there's a disincentive for anyone except those whose only desire is to promote Nazism, to even bother contributing which will further reinforce the distorted influence of this small but dedicated group of bastards dilligently constructing an echo chamber for themselves and they'll point to that echo chamber and their outsized influence in it and declare it the will of the people for the relative lack of a counter narrative. They'll cry foul and rail against censorship when attempts are finally made to curtail them as they simultaneously smother anything like free speech themselves through their continuing degradation of it.

"But can't we do that? What makes them special? If all it takes is dedication to an ideology shouldn't we just fight with equal zeal?" maybe, but this takes us back to the purpose of the forum, and of the individual instances too. If, on each visit, your time is dedicated to trying to fight bad faith actors deliberately perverting the discourse from either an explicitly stated topic (for a specialised instance) or just general discussion, then you're really not getting what you wanted or needed out of that place anymore.

The same applies to something less ideologically loaded but working in a similar fashion, ads, shitposting and astro turfing. Those are things you can be pretty sure you won't miss and we're all better off without, but similar to insidious fringe political groups, they will work against your idealistic principles to force themselves in to spaces you'd hoped to carve out apart from their malign influence. They'll fight dirty and use your tolerant policies to help them proliferate. Unchecked, they completely overrun a comment section, they do it at scale, with automation and strategy and often with backing which gives them staying power and an asymmetric ability compared to administrators and general users alike but technically, they're just sharing ideas, equally as valid as any other. They, like Nazis will also be probing the weaknesses of administrators, they'll use techniques that render case by case examination of borderline unacceptable behaviour ineffective and impractical and thereby side step moderation that's not empowered to deal with them at equal scale.

It is the sad nature of humanity and the internet that such things are predictable and inevitable. It means free speech is ironically something that has to be maintained through seemingly antithetical means, it's part of why it even exists as a concept, otherwise surely all speech would just be free speech by default and there'd be no point giving it a name. It's something that despite it's name actually requires careful balancing to make sure it really is actually free for everyone and that that concept not being abused to effectively amplify the speech of small groups at the expense of everyone else. Knowing all this if you are hosting a discussion platform you have a dilemma, do you choose not to act, in order to preserve the sanctity and purity of your principles and commitment to providing a platform for open discussion; only to watch that platform transform from such in to its very antithesis, or do you actively take steps to make sure your speaker's corner remains such both in theory and in practice.