[johnnyanmac]

Moderation isn't impossible. FREE Moderation probably is, yes. I wouldn't call myself a power user here on HN, but from my understanding the moderation here is done by one admin who is part of YCombinator.

I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.

>We need to go back to purposely small communities.

I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.

Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.