Excellent read with a well laid out argument. The article does a great job of making highly sympathetic arguments for both sides of the free speech vs censorship debate on the powerful social media platforms that are now serving as our global town square. The section titled "Incentives for Productive Speech" really reads like what I believe a platform like the Relevant community is attempting to accomplish with its rewards system: "A speech community is likely to produce whatever kind of discourse it incentivizes. This means that users should have formal or informal incentives to produce speech that is recognized by other users as worthy."

This article pushes so many ideas that I can't really find a quote to lean on. Worth a read, if not just a scan.

This is a wonderful article. It provides good reasons for why Relevant is such an important platform that can create a better future for our political free speech discourse. Thank you for sharing this!

“The speech platforms are rather closer to a form of mass voluntary intellectual pornography: a marketplace that lauds the basest instincts, incentivizes snark and outrage, brings us to revel in the savage burn. Even the vocally hostile consensus on the Left and in the mainstream press understates the problem by urging the platforms to throw more bodies and machine learning at the problem, urging Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to man up and flip the “fix democracy” switches they must have squirreled away in their desk drawers.” “But the problems of the speech platforms are not ones of bad actors at the fringes. Rather, they are baked into the incentive structures of the platforms themselves, through the kinds of speech they reward and penalize. The platforms are rotten to the core, inducing us all to become noxious versions of ourselves.”

It happened like a coordinated strike: In August 2018, in the span of 24 hours, a slate of tech companies banned Alex Jones from their platforms—first Apple’s app store, then Facebook and Spotify.[i] Twitter and PayPal joined the following month.[ii] The take cycle that followed was predictable: The Left argued that tech companies must limit misinformation and hate speech on their online platforms. The Right argued that banning Jones violated free speech and that the platforms do not wield their censorship power fairly.