I’m pretty sure HN, the site were literally posting on, does not have either of these, or at least not at that scale and yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.
As far as I know, HN does have two full-time employees whose sole job is moderation. I believe they also have some automated spam detection involved too.
> yet it’s miles better than anything on fb or twitter so I’m not sure I buy this argument.
This can be explained almost entirely by the fact that bad actors go where the greatest concentration of good actors is. Small communities are relatively safe with little effort required on their part, because they simply aren't a big enough target to be worth a bad actor's time.
For a long time, it was taken for granted that "Mac didn't have viruses". It wasn't because Mac OS was somehow more virus-proof than Windows. It was simply that Mac was like 2% of the marketshare and thus just not a worthwhile platform for hackers to target.
I believe that number is currently one.
Thousands of moderators is not achievable by small, hobbyist sites. But one or two moderators is doable.
True. I like HN. By the look of it you like it too. When you say HN is miles better than fb or twitter I'd say that is a subjective judgement. I suspect that only a fraction of the people currently spending their time on fb or twitter would spend any time on HN. They're looking for something else. Something they don't get here.
On another note I get the sense that the vast majority of users of those walled gardens couldn't give a hoot about the concerns raised in the essay. Those platforms currently deliver something of value to their target audiences (however that may be defined). So as long as they do that and no alternatives arise to disrupt their stranglehold things will remain as they are.
Pretty soon there are news reports about how badly you discriminate against certain groups and world governments start poking their nose in your business. Plus you hit that endless stream of edge cases where no matter what solution you choose someone is going to compare it to the holocaust. Even clear simple policies get bogged down in edge cases extremely quickly. For example, you might have a "no nudity" rule on your site. Very easy, but now you're getting lawsuits from the breastfeeding mother's association on one end for taking down their content and the anti-pornography league on the other end because you allowed a picture of a bare ankle to remain up.
If you keep it relatively small it may be manageable, because "scale" cuts both ways ;)
I remember back to the days of umpteen different mutually incompatible Instant Message apps each with a different subset of your friends. They all ultimately failed as social media platforms and the only ones left are either integrated with larger services (SMS, FB Messenger, etc...) or are domain specific microservices (Slack).
Because for a long time things were interoperable. Many chat services ran off jabber/XMPP. You could easily use adium, pigeon, psi, gajim, and even the AOL IM and iirc yahoo messenger would all communicate interoperably.
In fact, you could even jabber chat with those using Google talk/hangouts until Google decided not to play. Before that iteration was usenet, IRC and ICQ.
Now you have WhatsApp, google chat or whatever it's called now, Snapchat, Facebook messenger, tik tok, zoom, kakao talk etc. But nobody wants you to leave their garden. And Because somebody popular makes a post using some platform, the masses rush there and doesn't leagu leave until they're told to by the new YouTube personality du jour.
So no, i tend to think in the process of millenialing chat services, they made them simple for them to understand, and kept them in the garden so they wouldn't get lost..