There were better days, many years ago... eventually all not heavily moderated communities will suffer their version of Eternal September.
Communities with no moderation at all sans removing child porn and copyrighted content (to avoid getting v8 by the feds) will always be overtaken sooner or later by the content you just listed because this sort of stuff gets driven out of communities that care about at least some decency. The exception proving the rule is r/worldpolitics, which has no rules per se but there's enough porn to drown out hate speech.
eventually all not heavily moderated communities
will suffer their version of Eternal September.
4chan really is the ultimate example of what happens to unmoderated free speech zones. It really was better, once upon a time.
Unfortunately, it's hard to cite 4chan as an example when talking about the merits of unrestricted free speech vs. moderation/curation since most people think it was always that bad.
Communities with no moderation at all sans removing child porn and copyrighted content (to avoid getting v8 by the feds) will always be overtaken sooner or later by the content you just listed because this sort of stuff gets driven out of communities that care about at least some decency. The exception proving the rule is r/worldpolitics, which has no rules per se but there's enough porn to drown out hate speech.