Maybe so, but I still think this can work. I think the problem is that we've moved away from communities focused around a particular topic to just throwing everyone into a pool and crossing our fingers.
If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).
This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.
The problem isn't an ideological or semantic one but the fact that most news operations don't have the resources or motivation to moderate online commentary effectively, and the cost of poisoning conversation is trivially low.
Most new organizations are also general-purpose, meaning the organization will cover everything from politics to sports to tech to finance to gossip. My assertion is that trying to be all things to all people leads us into impossible-to-moderate scenarios even before you look at the motivation/resources available with which to perform said moderation.
I'm proposing approaching the US code and other bodies of law (and associated jurisprudence) as a Wiki and seeing what happens. I propose that this could be an improvement over the whole representative democracy approach.
If a community has a topic and the majority of users are interested in discussing that topic, then when someone veers off-topic to rant about their favorite conspiracy theory, you don't have to be a judge of the validity of his viewpoint. You just gently point out that's not what people are there to talk about and that they're welcome to discuss said conspiracy theory over on yonder conspiracy theory aficionado forum (and ban them if they continue trying to detract from the conversation).
This then removes moderators as judges of what is Right and True (the problem facing moderators on Facebook/YouTube/other anything-goes platforms) and positions them in the much more manageable role of, well, moderating a conversation.