In my view the single biggest job in Silicon Valley that nobody is taking seriously is the role of moderation. It's nearly impossible to do properly and yet there doesn't appear to be another choice.
Free speech is a legal principle that allows communitieS of various opinions to appear, gather, discuss.
When one wants to create a community, one needs to have stronger standards than that as some subjects will tend to focus the attention on them.
We had an interesting experiment during a political shitstorm on /r/france (during the "Dieudonné affair" if you are interested): one month without political subjects. Heavy, exaggerated, broad, moderation line. Heh, it was a huge success! People who wanted to talk politics went to another sub (/r/francelibre or /r/politique) and the rest of the sub talked about lighter subjects. And enjoyed it.
But also, on the technical side, as someone who was active on Slashdot, I find reddit's system primitive and much easier to game. I am surprised that in a decade no better system has emerged.
Something that would use different weights for different people votes depending on your preferences. I would like setting to say "I want to see what people I find funny comment on that" next to "I want to see what people I disagree with, minus those I tagged troll, say about this".
It's not an easy problem to solve, I guess. I think Google is trying to make some inroads with Google News? But even then once you start personalizing the content, you're only going to see sources you like.
The reason nobody's solved the "moderation" problem is because it's the wrong abstraction or the wrong problem to solve. The problem to solve is how to make filtering and discovery better.
The question might be: do we really want to understand each other? Or straight to fisticuffs?
I don't regard myself as especially enlightened, I think that's another kind of trap, I think most of us just zone in and out of consciousness and 90% of this belongs to the lizard brain.
I suspect most moderators conflate centrism with non-bias or neutrality - but the real reason why the job is so difficult is precisely because sometimes the extremists are correct. Simply reining in the excesses of the left and right isn't enough.
I've said before: if a delay of several seconds was inserted into submissions to politically sensitive topics, that would help reduce # of death threats, name calling.
If it's any consolation the Internet has proven people have big mouths and fundamentally just can not be bothered to obtain genuine pitchforks.
As any online community expands, moderating and guaranteeing quality become extremely hard problems.