I think people should just accept the obvious fact: there is no free speech. It's an ideal. If you have a group convening on the basis of shared values, then certain things are obviously out of bounds. How about child porn? How about gratuitous torture porn? If you are promoting a Christian site, then certain obscenities against your God, Christ, and perhaps the Holy mother are going to be banned. If I start a site that's about rock music. Then somebody who comes there just to start shit with rock music fans, who obviously hates the genre and disrupts the flow for everyone else, is going to get banned. Duh. A great deal of this has nothing to do with stifling conversation, as such, but having a reason to curate your user base and eliminate people who are there to subvert plainly, i.e. they have no interest in conversation, only slander and chaos. This idea that you owe it to other people to adopt literal free speech standards is fucking retarded. If you come into my home, you aren't going to insult my wife. I'm going to throw your ass out the fucking door. I think most of the problems people have with sites like Reddit today pertain to how capricious the rules are, and how they've changed in real time. If a site sets itself up on the base of a certain rule set, applies those equally, and doesn't change to accommodate some moral purity spiral, ala modern liberalism, then you're fine. It's mostly that the current 'hive mind' is growing like a virus and the rules are changing so fast that intelligible, coherent conversation across two political poles has become impossible. People who cry free speech are often just pissed because they've been marginalized. In that sense, so many people here are no better than the Left. You don't like that they have the big fancy website with hundreds of thousands of hits - mostly, you cry out free speech because you resent how many people don't want to hear what you're saying.