I've personally been a moderator for communities with up to ~2 million users, where the main point of the biggest community was discussions around subjects that are generally taboo in society, so it attracts a lot of low-effort posts for sure. On average, the community had at least ~50K members online at any given time, if there is some big news that number increased a lot.
And we managed to moderate it well. Granted, the community has ~100 moderators who are all doing it in their free-time, but with the right tooling and the right guidelines/rules, moderation is not impossible. It's just really hard to get right.
Moderation is real continued work, not something you can do once and solve. Putting up an real life event at any size requires moderation or guiding the visitors. I don't know why people in tech continue to be surprised about having to take care of their audience.
There's taking care of your audience, and then there's discovering that not only are there some salespeople in your audience, trying to move v1xagra and c1alis, no that basically benign. It's that theres a mentally disturbed person going around, shitting on your digital walls and yelling at your other users. There's a digital gunman in your audience trying take your users hostage with ransomware. Which, I mean, after Columbine, the foiled shooting at De Anza College, Sandy Hook, the Mandalay Bay shooting, among far too many others; after those events IRL maybe I shouldn't be surprised when my site gets probed yet again for WordPress vulnerabilities, but (and my naivety is showing once again) in looking back from 2023, and comparing it to 1998 pre-Columbine kotte.org through my rose colored glasses, it's hard not to feel that something's wrong. I don't have to police the people I let into my house for them shitting on the walls, why is it so normal digitally and just accepted as the cost of doing business?
Most recently, the author of the basement community site documented their dealings with some when their site got popular, which included someone(s) of an anti-social bent. The cynic in me saw that coming from miles away so it's no longer a surprise, but in reflecting about 25 years of Kottke.org, actually, yeah it is.
>it may be possible for your small blog with little traffic...
Indeed, it is possible. My blog (pretty much unchanged in format since 2004) gets around 500 page views/day and averages ±10 comments/week. Just right, small enough that I can respond personally to comments.
