In terms of pageviews, Inkbunny currently gets ~525,000/day across 45,000 visits. FA does not offer precisely matching stats, but I believe their "online" figure relates to the last 15 minutes; if this is the case, I figure it has roughly 10-15 times Inkbunny's user traffic (i.e. ~7.5 million pageviews/day), and hence 50-75 times that of Weasyl. My best estimate for SoFurry is that it's a tad busier than Weasyl; the site was inaccessible to me when writing this comment.
Alexa stats tend to be of poor quality, but give some support to this traffic magnitude: Fur Affinity - e621 - Inkbunny - SoFurry - Weasyl - Furry Network - Furiffic
e621 clearly has a big audience, but it's more of a pure consumption portal.
Bigger is of course not always better, in sites as in cities. What tends to matter for watchers is how much unique art relevant to your interests is being posted, while for artists it can be more about how many active users are watching you (and perhaps how many are willing to pay).
You have to keep these needs in balance, and - for example - having a system on a new site which autoloads new art from elsewhere without the interaction of an absent artist can be counterproductive, because it reduces the chance that those actually participating in the community will get the attention of the very limited number of people spending time there.
Where you follow an artist can also impact where you +fav, or what works you +fav where. For example, one G-rated work posted by an artist at about the same time on each site saw:
on Fur Affinity (99 views, 33 +fav) - DeviantArt (74, 34) - Inkbunny (71, 17) - Weasyl (18, 2).
And of course there is some art which can't be posted on one or more of DA, FA, IB or WZL.
I would like to think that some sites are more tolerant than others - perhaps user age has an impact - but I have a sneaking suspicion that, if anything, they are tolerant of different things.
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As for hate speech, there is clearly a problem with specific threats of harm, but we need to be cautious about people feeling unable to speak honestly about policies on, say, immigration or affirmative action over fear of being accused of hate speech. [Trump, UKIP, etc. tapped into a well of discontent with politically-correct language by expressing true feelings; willingness to do so has to some extent distracted from the debate about whether their ideas are any good.]
"Hate" also poses a problem for most of the world's religions, which find themselves outside the mainstream. There have, for example, been several cases where preachers have been arrested for calling homosexual conduct a sin, despite that being a tenet of the state religion.
It can be hard standing up for free speech. Test cases typically involve highly objectionable content which most people disagree with, or they wouldn't have led to a prosecution. Often people are willing to stand up for freedom of speech relating to causes they support, but the true test of their priorities is whether they support speech which they don't agree with.
Your first question is complicated but here's a few attempts to answer it:
Inkbunny has ~2,600 members accessing the site in peak hours, 22,000 per day, 44,000 per week, and 66,000 per month. Weasyl has 500 hourly users at peak and 4,000 a day. Weasyl has about the same number of submissions as Inkbunny, but fewer users looking at them.
In terms of pageviews, Inkbunny currently gets ~525,000/day across 45,000 visits. FA does not offer precisely matching stats, but I believe their "online" figure relates to the last 15 minutes; if this is the case, I figure it has roughly 10-15 times Inkbunny's user traffic (i.e. ~7.5 million pageviews/day), and hence 50-75 times that of Weasyl. My best estimate for SoFurry is that it's a tad busier than Weasyl; the site was inaccessible to me when writing this comment.
Alexa stats tend to be of poor quality, but give some support to this traffic magnitude:
Fur Affinity - e621 - Inkbunny - SoFurry - Weasyl - Furry Network - Furiffic
e621 clearly has a big audience, but it's more of a pure consumption portal.
Bigger is of course not always better, in sites as in cities. What tends to matter for watchers is how much unique art relevant to your interests is being posted, while for artists it can be more about how many active users are watching you (and perhaps how many are willing to pay).
You have to keep these needs in balance, and - for example - having a system on a new site which autoloads new art from elsewhere without the interaction of an absent artist can be counterproductive, because it reduces the chance that those actually participating in the community will get the attention of the very limited number of people spending time there.
Where you follow an artist can also impact where you +fav, or what works you +fav where. For example, one G-rated work posted by an artist at about the same time on each site saw:
on Fur Affinity (99 views, 33 +fav) - DeviantArt (74, 34) - Inkbunny (71, 17) - Weasyl (18, 2).
And of course there is some art which can't be posted on one or more of DA, FA, IB or WZL.
I would like to think that some sites are more tolerant than others - perhaps user age has an impact - but I have a sneaking suspicion that, if anything, they are tolerant of different things.
---
As for hate speech, there is clearly a problem with specific threats of harm, but we need to be cautious about people feeling unable to speak honestly about policies on, say, immigration or affirmative action over fear of being accused of hate speech. [Trump, UKIP, etc. tapped into a well of discontent with politically-correct language by expressing true feelings; willingness to do so has to some extent distracted from the debate about whether their ideas are any good.]
"Hate" also poses a problem for most of the world's religions, which find themselves outside the mainstream. There have, for example, been several cases where preachers have been arrested for calling homosexual conduct a sin, despite that being a tenet of the state religion.
It can be hard standing up for free speech. Test cases typically involve highly objectionable content which most people disagree with, or they wouldn't have led to a prosecution. Often people are willing to stand up for freedom of speech relating to causes they support, but the true test of their priorities is whether they support speech which they don't agree with.