You were on the right track with the ironic parler comment, however, 4chan and old reddit, old school forums both always had and currently have moderation. The

You were on the right track with the ironic parler comment, however, 4chan and old reddit, old school forums both always had and currently have moderation. The moderation rules are just different than on other sites, but they had hundreds of humans moderating. Even the newer, arguably worse web forums out there are still policed internally, as you note. It's a myth that there was zero moderation. What the libertarian ideal was privacy and anonymity. Where a user could say something like sharing a link to the pirate bay and not worry about it too much when it got moderated. Websites would respect a users privacy. Moderation was about cleaning the site, not sharing a users personal data with authorities. It wasn't about free speech so much as a kind of place for users on the internet with no real world consequences for sharing, for example, a link to the pirate bay. They all moderated.