Well, I'm no history buff. If I say "wild west" in reference to an era of the internet, the odds are good that others will understand my meaning. Although what you say about the wild west actually reinforces what I cared about. I think individual sites should be allowed to have awful rulesets if they want, but only as long as it's possible for another site to pop up with a good ruleset and take all the traffic. This modern stuff of payment processor cancellation and host corruption makes me sick.

Do you consider the dangers of an encroaching authority to be your driving motivator or is your position based on principle?

For the free speech thing? Some of both, I think, but it depends on definition of authority. I'll assume the modern definition that means that anyone who is given an authoritative title is an authority, typically for the purpose of being allowed to wield power over other people legally (sometimes even reversed, where, say, a forum moderator can be called an authority just because he can wield power over users). I like to think that I'm mostly driven by the principle of the matter, but I acknowledge that seeing the grip tighten on speech online makes me double down.

I don't want the next generation to be denied the opportunities mine had growing up. I want kids to be able to shout nonsense in their headsets during pvp. I want teenagers to be able to misuse their creativity and time with elaborate troll operations. I want people to be able to find others with opposing ideas and have the chance to debate them in a no-holds-barred smackdown, and then I want the text left online for everyone to bear witness to.

There are some cracks in the principle, like trying to deal with spam (which is woefully simple to accomplish with bots now). No one really gets any use out of it, so it's usually a low resistance issue to widely ban it somehow, like having a moderator oversee all output. I think the better idea is to give each user the ability to mute others so they can have the exact kind of curation they desire - something which isn't really common sense to a lot of people because you can't do it in real life. In real life, if someone's being a nuisance in the movie theater, you can try to tune them out, but that's a big effort and will spoil your leisure. You could confront them, but what if they ignore you? Use force? That only works if they aren't one of the protected classes. Report to employees? What do you do if the employees don't care? Manager won't do anything unless he cares. (I haven't gone to a theatre in over 10 years, can you tell)

I think you have a good attitude for a creator. You sound like you've overcome the common issues that trip up small time creators. I keep an eye on a couple of amateur game dev groups (not the same as writing, but still a creative field) and they can be a real sorry lot. Lecturing doesn't do much, the important stuff like motivation and priorities have to be discovered by the individual. Lot of people with big rockstar dreams that get caught up in promises of easy victory.