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I agree that it doesn't necessarily always devolve into hate speech but, anecdotally, every community I've seen without heavy moderation eventually devolves into low effort meme posts, and sometimes hateful content. For example, r/gaming vs r/games. The pattern repeats itself all over reddit.

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If a community widely upvotes low effort memes then that’s what the community wants to see. The people have spoken! Why do you think you know what’s better for them?

“Hate speech” is a buzzword that doesn’t mean anything. What is hate speech? No one knows.

All unmoderated communities upvote easy to consume content. That's how group dynamics work. You either have to limit who can enter the community at all (which is what HN tacitly does), or what can be posted.

Are you suggesting that if I start a community called "pics_of_cute_cats" and a bunch of people come in and start posting military insignia, that's what the community wants?

Because it's certainly not what I, a member of pics_of_cute_cats want.

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