The Long Blogging View
I've been around on the internet long enough to remember when it was more of a rumor for people who had lots of money to spend to play on it. Indeed, seeing someone with a Commodore growing up, was, to me, a type of luxury that would not be coming my way.
In the 90's though computers either became affordable enough or the internet wide-spread enough we finally had one in our own home. I remember it being something somewhat strange with the modem noises and the dial-ups humming and pinging and then all the Compuserve stuff that suddenly sprang into motion along with Network Manager and a bunch of other stuff, that at the time, was more of a "what the hell is this," than it was a "this is what this can do". I think that's what made computing fun. One really didn't know what the boundaries were with the technology at that point. The possibility space was still being explored in a myriad of ways.
Later of course, came the blogging deluge. I was a part of a community called Blogit which I suspect was one of the first "paid to blog" type of community places. It still exists, actually. Right here, in fact. I remember a lot of personalities on there. One of them was always reporting and ranking quite high article wise on how she had had another another affair on her husband. On a lark not long ago, I searched her name and found she had died in 2017. She did say though, probably in around '08 or so that she had finally stopped cheating on her husband and found a cabin to live in. Said she also didn't know why she had cheated so much but that it was rather like she felt possessed by a demon. I was glad to hear, for her sake, that she had finally gotten past whatever it was that was driving her to feel like she had to use sex to get attention whether for writing, or whatever. (doubly so if it happened to be a demon)
I eventually wound up getting kicked off the Blogit community. The short of it was the community was trying to come up with rules that amounted to a kind of censorship to protect itself from speech issues, but they were all the wrong kind of rules. I wrote up a post demonstrating how, when employed in satire, none of those rules was really going to work. I didn't exactly BREAK the rules, but I really, really bent them. That was enough for the mods that were to trounce me off the site and a slew of articles speculating as to why I did what I did emerged in the community.
The answer was simple. I did what I did to show that those rules were not going to work, and if you happened to censor me there then probably I would be unable to trust the Blogit community to have clear judgment in the future with anything I would write there. Therefore, it would be better to show the issue and allow events to take their course whether that meant I was in the community afterward or not.
I've had a lot of internet writing and blogs since that time, and now the thing I was pointing out to Blogit then is a epidemic everywhere else. The pervasive hive-mind groupthink perceives non-conformity as a threat. AI is the likely next iteration of this type of rule-based enforcement. (Robots love rules and don't really understand when they should be bent)
Many of these matters are put into focus at the point money enters into the calculation. For instance, on communities like Livejournal, nobody really made money unless they had ads from Google or their site in some way or another. As soon as somebody starts paying you money, they seem to think they have the authority to tell you what to do. (Dave Chappelle has a very colorful routine on the matter wherein he describes that people offered him lots of money and suddenly wanted to place a certain appendage in his mouth at the same time)
It is an odd thing, though, that the Blogit community never censored the person I mentioned who felt demon possessed and who was committing a million affairs and was paid to sensationalize it in writing and yet on the other hand, a PERCEIVED transgression was enough to shut my whole account down. Indeed, they kept paying her for the content that was coming from possibly a demonic source whereas my own content which was coming from a "Let's think about this carefully" perspective was quickly shot down like a Japanese Zero at Midway.
An interesting thing, though, is when people are given a clear example of where the rules don't apply, they tend to dogmatically stick behind their original view that they interpreted the rule rightly despite a ton of evidence to the contrary. Many "rational people" call this a confirmation bias, but I see it more akin to a military mindset gone wrong. "Following orders". The excuse is always "Well, they knew the rules!" Sure, sure. What are the rules on allowing demons to publish so you get ratings and continual money and attention for your site, though?
I would say then, that this was the beginning of my experience of the internet/computer space being LESS about exploration, and more of a slow drift toward exploitation although the morays involved were varied and shifty. It seemed blogging had more in common with say, The National Enquirer than it did with something like The Federalist Papers. Isn't freedom of speech better utilized with the second case than the first? Is writing ONLY for entertainment, and to hell with whatever is inspiring the entertainment and those who venture onto the "Devil's playground"?
These questions should, prima facie, be solvable. Community rules and contributor covenants certainly change under the light of examination significantly if they are in violation of transcendental moral laws. Though there are many that say they don't believe in such a thing, the great thing about transcendental moral law is that it doesn't require them to do so. It will transcend their belief and be binding just the same.
I wonder how many people were affected by my former acquaintance and her sensational blogs concerning affairs. Were they entertained? Would it have changed anything if they had known she felt demon-possessed and tortured? Did it inspire any of them to let some kind of dark energy into their lives? What accountability is there to places that allow that kind of content to grow like a malignant cancer? I am not saying that a person isn't free to talk about those things, but they surely are not free to talk about those things and slam shut the channels of speech on those who are considering the application of the community rules. After all, to shut down free thought in favor of demonic entertainment has more in common with a legion of hell than a publication.