[sanderjd]

This gets at why I think this is fundamentally a terrible idea. I think it would be a legal and social minefield the likes of which I'm not sure the world has ever seen.

You know how community meetings and town halls are awful and fruitless because they're filled to the brim with the noisiest cranks and they can't be kicked out because they're still members of the public after all, and nobody else participates because it's maddening to be around all those noisy cranks? Like that, but web scale.

I'm sure the noisy cranks would love this, but I'm not interested in it.

[dynamorando]

I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful.

As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?

In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.

NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.

Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?

I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.

[sanderjd]

Yes, there are private entities with good moderation. A public entity (in the US) with those same moderation policies would have a very hard time avoiding infringement of the first amendment.