It is the essential problem. That's why I have such hope for this place: can the trap be avoided if there is no moderation, but everyone is given the tools to shape their own experience - seamlessly, individually, with no overarching "moderator" position belonging to anyone?
It's still really small. It may never be big. But it functions without moderators.
I think Alexis and Steve had a different architecture in mind when they created Reddit. I think they figured people would eventually silo into their own subreddits and interact only with the people they had affinity for. But then, I think they had no understanding of human behavior and less interest in learning and when it became obvious that people will consume at 10x the rate they create and that anger is a far better motivator than joy, they just skated along and counted their money.
Hubski community works because we're small and not very diverse. If we were to grow 10x as big we would have more problems. The more people you have the more likely you are to have people with drastically incompatible views and those people will naturally clash and fight. In a small community they may choose to keep things civil and ignore each other but in a large community it makes more sense to attack the opposition and rally your like minded supporters.
Yeah, I don't think so. We keep saying "this will work only this far" but it keeps working. I think the architecture scales, and I think it's in all of our best interests to keep the architecture scaling. It's not like "this will work until suddenly we need moderators" as we've had these little bimbo eruptions before.
The community survives.
I wonder what would happen if a large group with distasteful beliefs all joined Hubski at the same time? Would we see a splintering of sorts where multiple groups coexisted but didn't interact much with each other, or would we see a lot of vicious fighting like in other internet communities? Or something else? Do you think Hubski could survive something like that without moderation?
It's happened several times. We had the CircleJERKERS (the guys who brought you the chimpire), we had Lorelai, we had Team SRS.
What happens is they form their own little circlejerky cadres, recognize that nobody else is interacting with them, and leave.