But the thing is people aren’t having “their say”. Social media companies are amplifying voices and viewpoints. They are not acting as “common carriers” letting quality sift to the top. It is curated and crafted.

Now they're thumbing down the scale for censorship.

“Letting quality sift to the top” implies that there is a way for this to happen without curation.

Pure user vote driven things like Reddit are a failure (echo chambers, emotional appeals, bot rings, etc). So I’m curious what you think would let that happen?

Even HN is heavily moderated to maintain topics.