> family friendly lobbyists approved programming for your minds
This has not been the case since self-hosting, home pages, tilde-accounts (~username public_html) ended quite a long time ago. No more customisation like in the earlier days - Neopets and MySpace both let you use HTML, CSS, and often helped teach kids them.
For a long time past that era it's been "insert your personal information into these well defined boxes and we will ban you if you enter anything false while selling all your data to as many people as possible". The internet for over a decade now has been built to _consume_, not produce.
Devil's advocate: you agreed to these terms that they can pull anything advertiser unfriendly or deemed abusive by posting your content on a third party privately-owned service; nobody is stopping you from running your own. "Oh we can't scale as much as AWS" is not a good excuse. If the Big Four don't want to touch you there are plenty that will.
In a past web forum I did infrastructure for, without sufficient moderation and constant updates to captchas/challenge questions, we would get over 25k signups a day (100 legitimate signups a day), and over 500k spam posts a day (<5k legit). You'd be sending every single client multiple-digit terabytes of literal spam, much of it illegal spam (CC theft dump sales, illegal online pharmacy, are common spam) and making them dig through it.
Imagine viewing a single thread, and downloading about 5GB a page of gzipped viagra ads covered in the entire text content of a Harry Potter book in a desperate attempt to get past some filter, and then having to filter through to get the one or two posts.
My entire problem with censorship, philosophically, is some unwanted third party making demands on my information input. The goals of moderation need not be at odds with my goal to determine for myself what I wish to read. Categorization and shared filter lists could go a long way here.
It seems like we want the same thing. If we don't have any kind of moderation, then that filtering is pushed out to each and every leaf node, instead of being handled centrally, and this is a huge demand on my attention for information input. Do you remember how bad email spam had gotten before we developed effective server-side spam filtering? Email had become basically unusable.
The categorization is handled upstream. The decision of what to do with that information is left to me. I think that's the ideal model.