As moderator of a top-100 subreddit: this is SO incredibly accurate. You must be another moderator of one of the big subreddits. 90% of my work is nuking flamewars, spammers, trolls, and low-effort meme replies.
Without automation and human moderators to clean up, it's basically impossible to have a free exchange of ideas or any good discussion. Free speech disappears into the noise.
The idea of free speech is great and was a big step forward in an era where government oppression was a primary fear. But in the Internet Age, I think Civil Discourse is a better goal to aim for.
One of the original ideas was with the up and down arrows, the good content rises to the top. The problem with heavy handed moderators is that they are often biased and many get on a power trip.
This, more or less. Even if someone wanted to powertrip like crazy they literally wouldn't be able to do much. Delete 100 comments? Wait 15 minutes and another 100 will replace them.
People assume "mod powertripping" too quickly. The reality is that most of the moderation is accomplished via automation, primarily Automoderator rules on Reddit. The volume is far to high to manage by hand -- it varies by community and month but it's around 75%+ automated for us.
Automation makes mistakes. A LOT. Sometimes a person catches them and overrides the bot, often they don't.
There are some communities that abuse the automation to enforce bias, of course. For example, /r/news appears to be auto-censoring things about coronavirus or that might be perceived as negative for Trump (ex: the Russian bounties scandal). But this is much rarer than people think -- with the exception of bans, most of the "mod abuse" is simply bots screwing up.
Without automation and human moderators to clean up, it's basically impossible to have a free exchange of ideas or any good discussion. Free speech disappears into the noise.
The idea of free speech is great and was a big step forward in an era where government oppression was a primary fear. But in the Internet Age, I think Civil Discourse is a better goal to aim for.