> First off, the first amendment is specifically with respect to congress, and I don't understand why I have to say this so often.

Obviously. I'm referring to the general values that led to the US having protections on free speech.

> society has always been self censoring

You are seemingly idealizing the process by which social shaming encourages conformity.

> the internet has thrown a wrench into that by allowing people to escape into pockets of like minded individuals.

So you either have an idealistic view of an ideologically homogeneous society, or you think that the internet making economies of scale possible for non-mainstream beliefs is broadly a bad thing, regardless of what those beliefs are.

> And you might have noticed that hacker news is fairly heavily censored

I have, and in most cases (other than explicit griefing or bullying) I think this is quite harmful to HN. The content discussed on HN is simply not interesting to most people, which is why HN has survived. It's easy to suffer from hindsight bias and determine that since HN has aggressive moderation HN is better that it would otherwise be.

Someone recently did a study of title edits and found that articles typically drop precipitously after the editors meddle with the title. This is typically because the author's title fails to communicate why the article is interesting to HN readers, while the user-submitted title often does (when they differ).

Worse, the study showed that mods actively bury specific discussions from the site. We really don't know what we're missing due to this, but chances are it's political. This very discussion (critical of social media companies) is of high risk for being censored simply because the main reason for HN article burying is that the article triggers comments that are viewed as overly political in nature.

This view (that political discussion is harmful) is dangerous and naive (and dangerously naive) because it assumes that HN readers are incapable of acting both as techies and as citizens simultaneously, and that with political beliefs nobody will ever change his/her mind based on the merits of someone else's argument. I enjoy HN discussions precisely because I learn a lot. What I learn is not linked to the topic, or to the political nature (or lack of it) of the discussion.

> has managed to avoid turning into a cesspool like much of reddit.

I think the biggest cespool in reddit is /r/gifs and similar fluff that is used by spam marketers to get their content viral. Yes there are things about donald and other obscure and idiotic groups that I've found at random now and then when clicking on the random subreddit button, those are easily ignored.

In fact, the only reason a normal reddit user encounters the morons is because /r/gifs (or similar) are among the default subreddits subscribed to automatically for new accounts, casting a wide net but drastically lowering the bar of discussion.

Gifs are not posted to HN because the community has no interest in that rubbish or any of the similar rubbish it attracts. Reddit would not have a problem if it were not so focused on creating a mass market for ad sales rather than just letting people associate with people they wish to associate with and easily block the bad apples or griefers.