My day job includes moderation. I think I am more empathetic to the issues that moderators deal with on a day to day basis given that they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked.
It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.
My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)
I'm not very sympathetic to moderators. Their job is to make some forum contain only what they want to hear from the (unpaid) people providing the content. If that's what you want, start a blog.
In any sort of IRL community, if some person decided they had the authority to prevent people from answering others' questions, unilaterally decide people aren't welcome, etc. everyone would think they had gone insane.
However there is the problem where any unmoderated public forum will eventually contain only scam artists and Nazis. Moderators address the Nazi spam problem, but now you have the moderator problem. It's been a mental side project of mine lately to find ways to solve the moderator problem, which I can't talk too much about as there is money to be made by doing so.
What happens when the forum gets overrun by Nazi spam?
We'll install a set of moderators who remove it.
But what happens when the moderators start removing useful information?
We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the moderators.
But aren't the snakes even worse?
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Then we're stuck with gorillas!
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Yes this is the really hard problem of human organization on the internet. You need mods to keep the quality gate up. But eventually mods feed off their own power and alienate the community. Maybe some combination of human and algorithmic moderation can help.
It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I noticed that SO started getting more strict from 2014 onward, I wouldn't know immediately what to do about the content quality issue.
My take is that, like most things, the medium of the old will be appreciated the way it wasn't in 2014. As the Brian Eno quote goes: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." People will yearn for the human forums the same way they did years past when people tire of the LLM slop. (If they do.)