SA has been taken over by a non-shithead and now the moderation is "yeah, you can fuck off now" and it's much nicer

though tbf it's greatly improved because we're all old with bad backs now and aren't putting up with dumb bullshit any more

to be fair, a lot of the early Internet, including the early research Internet, was driven by libertarian tendencies (which always ignored the dilemma in combining libertarian tendencies with the fact that the entire early Internet was enabled by massive government funding). John Perry Barlow, the EFF, etc. It’s just that a lot of those people were libertarian utopians – and I will fully admit that in my youth it seemed very convincing. It felt like there were no space for bad actors because when the Internet was smaller, it was less obvious to idealists and the naïve that a larger internet would be incredibly useful for bad actors.

As recently as gamergate the EFF was loudly insisting that all moderation by private companies was wrong, and in the intervening few years they have only grudgingly and rarely admitted that overly libertarian moderation policies can suppress speech massively. And yet I fully believe all the EFF people mean well.

I'm not up to date on my SA banning people lore, but hasn't it also been several times that after people finally got banned from they made stuff infinitely worse? Like 4chan is from SA, but there was also a far right racist forum for people banned from SA, the my posting career people for example (at least I heard they were banned SA people, which could be a lie, we know how much they love multiple blankets of irony. Also their site is now dead thankfully).