Big old media companies treat it like a place to say whatever. Big new media companies treat it like a place where their users can say whatever. It shouldn't be.

Ah, we finally disagree on something! I'm in favor of protecting first amendment rights unilaterally, but that doesn't mean people should be free from the repercussions of the things they say. Obviously, this sets up a landscape defined by identity, i.e. anonymous vs. pseudonymous vs. direct attribution vs. the risk of doxxing, which is a sort of war we've seen play out over the last few years in several arenas. Example: a "verified" flair on Twitter carries weight, which I think is great.

Anonymous accounts say particularly hateful things, of course, and the level of anonymity in any community (with permanent usernames, i.e. not /b/ or some equivalent) is directly proportional to the size of that community. Hence, Hubski is essentially pseudonymous because of its small size, and you and I get to very effectively police against shitty people, spammers, and bots. What I think/hope will happen gradually is that users in most semi-permanent communities will tire of sifting through the garbage spewed by the hateful and anonymous minority, and favor insightful, positive content. Yes, there's an implicit assumption here that people are generally good, and yes, existing Facebook interactions of zero anonymity may prove that my optimism is ambitious. One thing that's indisputable is that we're still in the infant stages of integrating the internet into our society, or vice versa. Things are tumultuous. They should be. The internet's a much bigger deal than Gutenberg's printing press.

People may always have a platform where they can threaten to rape other people's moms or whatever. It would be stupid of me to ask the threatened to "toughen up" or disregard those threats, because I have no idea what it's like to be impacted by rape. And rape is staggeringly common, I know. Maybe if we had better mental healthcare, victims would be more impervious? What a pickle :(. The racism situation is on par or maybe even worse. I don't know how you'd measure that, and it'd be terribly depressing to study either/or as a profession. Ugh