When was it ever true that public discussion didn't require moderation? We live alongside a pile of mush brained, mouth breathing dullards whose single and only goal in life is for somebody to vote up their latest brain fart and be told what to think.
Largely we excluded these people from conversation with social cues and sold them back their prejudices via red-top newspapers, which mostly kept their brain farts and prejudices suppressed.
For better or worse, you can't do that with the internet. Facebook and twitter seem hell bent on not only encouraging their appalling behaviour but amplifying it.
The only way to stay away from them is to stay ahead of them and stay away from any medium these idiots think is "their place".
They do vote and they should vote. That to me is quite different from deliberately inflaming them to other actions.
edit: what I mean by that is that facebook, twitter and reddit and 4chan should be held directly responsible for the violence they foster. "we're just a communication mechanism" doesn't cut it anymore. Their promotion algorithms are very different from being a telephone company
4chan is a healthy community. No karma, no "flagged" posts and none of the bullshit you see here. HN is objetively inferior in every measurable way, and I've been using both for >10 years.
