[munificent]

It looks like you're getting downvoted, but I think this is a good point and worth thinking about.

I believe one key difference here is group identity perception. If you like thinking in business terms, you could say "branding".

Facebook, Reddit, HN, Twitter, etc. all must care about content moderation because there is a feedback loop they have to worry about:

1. Toxic content gets posted.

2. Users who dislike that content see it and associate it with the site. They stop using it.

3. The relative fraction of users not posting toxic content goes down.

4. Go to 1.

Run several iterations of that and if you aren't careful, your "free" site is now completely overrun and forever associated with one specific subculture. Tumblr -> porn, Voat -> right-wing extremism, etc.

Step 2 is the key step here. If a user sees some content they don't like and associates it with the entire site it can tilt the userbase.

The web as a whole avoids that because "the web" is not a single group or brand in the minds of most users. When someone sees something horrible on the web, they think "this site sucks" not "the web sucks".

Reddit is an interesting example of trying to thread that needle with subreddits. As far as I can tell, Reddit as a whole isn't strongly associated with porn, but there are a lot of pornographic subreddits. During the Trump years, it did get a lot of press and negative attention around right-wing extremism because of The_Donald and other similar subreddits, but it has been able to survive that better than other apps like Gab or Voat.

There are still many many thriving, wholesome, positive communities on Reddit. So, if there is a takeaway, it might be to preemptively silo and partition your communities so that a toxic one doesn't take down others with it.

[Nasrudith]

I personally see it as "plausible deniability" as the cynical actual distinction for what gets people to share blame. Not actual affiliations or whose servers it is run on. Any number of objectionable sites are run on AWS and you basically need to be an international scandal or violating preexisting terms to get booted. Like some malware to governments merchants. Amazon's policies did not care if it was legal just if you were doing so unauthorized. A wise move when international law is really like the Pirate code.

The interlinking between the pages themselves and common branding are what creates the associations. Distributed twitter alternatives like Mastodon can even share the same branding but it is on a per network basis and complex enough to allow for some "innocent" questionable connections.