Took about two seconds.

Turns out when you build a platform around anti-censorship you wind up with a small number of free speech enthusiasts and a large number of people who will be banned from any site with rules against hate speech.

Then when you have a site where 80% of the content is racism the 20% non racists leave.

Voat was so fucking toxic. Radioactive hate swamp.

The rules only matter if the admins adhere to them and enforces them consistently.

Yes, you got me: by "hidden rules" I obviously meant the very highly visible, non-hidden ones, placed where nobody can miss them at the top of the page.

Those hidden rules, shown openly and have working links. So hidden. I heard McDonald's hides the Big Mac from the public too.

The issue is that users generally don't get a say. Even in the fediverse, moderators aren't chosen democratically. Yeah, you can start your own community and try to build it up, but inertia is not in your favor.

Anyway, my point is that a "no politics" rule is not really reasonable. You can have one, and you can enforce it however you want. It will always just end up causing issues though. For example: look up Nazi degenerate art. It's just art, right? However, to them it was political, and it was political in a way they didn't like, so they removed it from society.

No moderator is perfect. Even if you trust them, blurry rules probably aren't the best. There's better ways to define the intent than "no politics" that create clear borders of what's allowed and what isn't. Blurry rules are usually best for those who want to abuse it.