Any moderation position that can be filled by an unemployed shut it will be filled by an unemployed shut in.

Yiu either have to pay your mods, like hn, or have your mods pay you, like the old BBS boards that reddit and stack overflow replaced.

Problems of the 2010s.

Today you can use an 8b model to flag all problematic posts. The only issue is that all the posts are also by 8b models.

That would've happened regardless. But the alternative --- zero moderation, 100% free speech --- is how you get flamewars and spam like Slashdot and tons of other forums before it suffered from.

I don't think an alternative exists. Reddit was very unique. The last great BBS (in a sense) that non-Internet natives "got".

Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible, it was an extremely reliable place to get perspectives from real people about loads of things. It's still useful for this purpose, but the same level of trust isn't there.

Now that social networking a la short-form video is "it" right now, I'm not sure if something text-based will thrive again like Reddit did. (People have been trying to make Lemmy the thing, and it's less popular than Mastodon.)

Everything kind of fractured apart and now those niche communities are building up again elsewhere.

Discord has a lot (looking at my discord I see, gaming, programming, clothing/fashion/aesthetic, language, dnd, music, keyboard / hardware, dance, etc... communities).

I've noticed a lot of the major reddit communities have matching communities in the fediverse, specifically the ones with old reddit-like UIs. (lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, mander.xyz, etc...).

I've also noticed a lot of web-standards / browser developers and some gamedevs moved to twitter-style fediverse sites (e.g. mastodon.social, indieweb.social, infosec.exchange, hackyderm.io, floss.social, fosstodon.org, etc...).

---

I think the fediverse is working well for the niche communities for three reasons:

- Having that little bit more initial friction to learning how the fediverse works has made it better since it keeps out the low quality spamming users.

- Niche communities can only grow organically within their own spaces (since forcing them makes them seem inauthentic).

- The big plus of the fediverse is being able to follow/interact with users/communities across the boundary of being on another website. So it doesn't matter if a niche community you want to follow springs up on another website, you can follow them and participate from the website you already use.

For example: the old reddit-like communities that I follow (listed above) appear in a single feed in my programming.dev account (since that's the first one I joined), and the old twitter-like communities I follow appear in a single feed in my mastodon.social account (since that's the first twitter-like one I joined).