this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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I agree with your assertion that above a certain size you need strong moderation but disagree that it has to be toxic.
There are two components to being successful at strong moderation: you need mods that are opinionated but work to the benefit of the community (I think dang does a decent job at this) and a community that trusts the moderation.
Comparing HN and Lemmy, HN generally trusts their mods while Lemmy does not. As a result, dang on HN can prune low-effort threads and it doesn't cause much of an uproar, but doing this on Lemmy would probably be much more difficult.
As far as enforcement, I'd just remove the fluff threads that get the same, repeated 5-6 comments. We already know everyone's opinion about Elon Musk, the potential perils of AI, and the occasional string of threads over 2-3 weeks when $bigtechnologycompany doing $unpopularthing with a new article that rehashes information for clicks. People may disagree, but that's okay. The goal should be to try to judge content on it's discussion merits, not the user who posted it or personal beliefs. There will be screwups, but the community will need to assume good intent and the moderator will need to own up to mistakes.
HN doesn't try to cater to everyone and that's their greatest strength. If my theoretical approach causes people to leave, that's OK.
A lot of communities/subreddits/forums prioritize a growing user count number instead of fostering insightful discussion. I think this is what causes the huge communities to grow bland and foster an environment for abusive mods. It's one thing to want to claim "I moderate a forum with 500k people", but it's another to say "I learn something new from my community every day".
I'm content with c/technology and think the mods are doing a good job. It scratches the itch I want for being a general-purpose place to chat tech-related things but I would be elated to find a community that has a much higher bar for discussion.
Right, but that will also mean that the community will no longer be "big". That's my point.
If mods started going as far as deleting threads on the basis of "this discussion is already beaten to death and is not bringing anything new", you can bet that this will be taken as an act of "censorship" and will cause everyone to leave to form their own factions - except maybe the ones that are aligned with the mods enough to understand the principles behind the decision.
My best counter-example is to look at (well... pre-Reddit-API-controversy...)
r/ask_historians. It's one of the largest subreddits that became notorious for it's very strict moderation. If a big community is defined by either user-count or unique participating users (as a proxy to gauge how close-knit everyone is), I think it classifies as both easily.Even after it became very tightly moderated, it's subscriber count generally tracked the growth rate of other subreddits. Even if the unique participant count growth rate is lower than other subs, I don't think it ever felt "close-knit".
Participation in forums isn't (entirely) a zero-sum game. Groups of people can break off and still participate in the old space.
There's also no realistic way to handle users that default to not trusting moderators who are trying to make a good-faith attempt at community building. It's a cooperative exercise at any scale.
IMO this relationship between users and mods is the only one that matters. Assuming the mods are acting in good faith, this combination seems to be the only way to grow a community that won't implode on the first bout of controversy.
I think ask_historians is in itself a community with such an specific goal that it makes it hard to be subdivided, but I see your point. The bigger question is how this could be replicated for other communities, if at all.