[japhyr]

I'll share a take that comes from spending many years as a classroom teacher. Every classroom is a community. Regardless of your views on education, you have to do something to manage that community. If you do nothing, then the loudest voices will take over. The people with the loudest voices tend to drown out others, and their views and actions start to influence everyone else in a very unbalanced way. I've seen this play out in multiple classrooms, in every school I've been in, both as a teacher and as a student.

Every social media platform is a community, and often a collection of smaller communities as well. Moderation is hard, and doing it well costs money. Doing it well means losing many of the loudest users to other platforms that let them shout as loudly as they want.

Most platforms have given in to these loudest users, to the detriment of the communities they were starting to build. Some platforms have done this intentionally; some have fallen into these patterns because they're unwilling to do the hard work of moderation, or unable to figure out how to do it well at the scale they ultimately reach.

Anyone who enjoys the HN community more than some other social platforms should be aware of how much this community is actively moderated, by a small but very skilled moderation team. (I believe it's two people at the moment.)