[alexc61]

Good question, especially as Blind was a big "inspiration" for us (in that we wanted to build something explicitly not like Blind).

I think there are 2 things here: 1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.

2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.