A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.
Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.
In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.
I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.