4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.

Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.

Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...

Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead. The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that people new to the site will be scared off by all the diarrhea mixed with the slowly disappearing amount of actual content to the point where the people being awful are the only ones left. Eventually they'll entrench their bullshit until that becomes the character of the whole site. Normal people are repulsed by it at first glance and those left only descend deeper and deeper into their own mad echo chamber.

Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election.

I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.

>4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit

...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.

I think most people that are happy about Elon taking over aren't free speech absolutists in the sense of the term you're using it.

Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.

There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.

And if you want a more direct analogue if you assume that the problem with 4chan is the culture and not the moderation that the absolute worst most vile Mastadon servers are no moderation to the point where major servers had to just completely blacklist them. If you want to lose all faith in humanity peruse the Gab database dump.

No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.

>it's absolute shit.

So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it. In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").

The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor. As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.

can't wait to see the people advocating against fundamental freedoms to finally get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick.

Somehow I don't feel bad about 4chan .. it's all just complete absurd mayhem but there's no agenda.. Whereas any twitter storm feels a lot heavier. Super strange.

ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there

Yup. It's a new 4chan as of now. Musk just ruined a decent service worse than mediocre.

https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&...

Right. It's going to fester with dark elements of the society and he's going to hire back all the content moderators he fired and then pen another open letter to advertisers.

There's a rich and beautiful irony in seeing a bunch of armchair libertarians gushing about the glories of unfettered speech on HN - a web forum that employs some of the most heavy-handed moderation in the biz.

Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...

There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.

Usenet?