[7373737373]

Adding social media features (profiles, comments, and temporarily even a reddit-like sub-page) to one of my sites sent me straight to moderation hell. People intentionally violating the rules, disagreeing with my decisions, insulting me, spreading lies. Community drama, spammers, DDOSers... Once a site becomes popular enough, even if a tiny fraction of its users behaves maliciously (or just badly), it can become overwhelming for one person. Eventually someone uploaded illegal images, which led to the most stressful day of this year and me having to disable some functionality and making some things more difficult.

On one hand, I feel people YEARN for places to express themselves more than they are currently able to, and they really want alternatives to the established platforms. Nicer places. But damn, if you intend to provide such a place, be prepared to police it, and expect every functionality to be used for other things than its intended purpose, and to be misused and/or abused.

[muzani]

IME, ban fast and hard. I used to do this back in the day with webrings and free forums.

Quality drops to the level of its lowest member. If it's a personal site, you don't have to tolerate idiots. People tend to not say nice things on a place full of graffitti.

Also my experience, but it's not too bad, the ratio seems to be about 1 in 10000. But if you have a million people, I can see it going bad fast.