[black_puppydog]

I don't know about discord, but the "economies" of scale for reddit were mostly to let the users do it, no? They didn't really develop (powerful) moderation tools in-house, and don't really do much moderation themselves. So I don't see why that shouldn't replicate nicely to multiple public forums.

[TeMPOraL]

Sort of. For Reddit, economies of scale applied at the platform level. Sure, individual subreddits had to moderate submissions and comments on their own, however they didn't have to secure servers and networks against attack, manage user credentials, defend against DDoS attacks, etc. Even with spam / abusive content, the more egregious forms would be filtered out centrally, which is more automation subreddit operators had to neither manage nor pay for.

[marginalia_nu]

In part. But also consider that because they have site-wide data along with votes and moderation-actions to train on, they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

Like even as a moderator of a popular subreddit, it's actulaly pretty very rare to see the sort of link spam that would plague old fashioned forums or comment sections.

[black_puppydog]

> they're in a position to build a very competent botspam filter.

If that's the issue, then anyone with a little bit of donation money to run a simple LLM will now be able to disrupt discord? Awesome! :)

[dv_dt]

Moderator users do a lot of work. Even something simple, like a shared blocklist of trolling user accounts could save work. But, better federation moderation tools will also be able to bring some (most?) of the advantages of centralized public forums to decentralized forums.

[Semaphor]

They have to be doing something. I was missing a few small (50k-ish) subs until recently, and spam essentially was a non-issue. A few years ago my blog needed to have comments manually allowed.

[canadianfella]

Missing?

[Semaphor]

*modding

[ianburrell]

My understanding is that Reddit does lots of spam filtering. It does a good enough job that moderators don’t complain about that. It is good enough that can have mostly unmoderated subreddit if don’t care about off topic posts.

The moderators are responsible for off-topic filtering and catching anything, usually human made, that slips through.

[not_alexb]

I've moderated tiny subreddits and I can assure you that spam leaks through everyday.