What a shitty response to a valid question. I’ll make this easy and just block you so we can end this here.

Sure, it’s manageable now, but it quickly won’t be if Lemmy continues to grow the way it currently is. “Add mods in the future” is kind of a hand-wave of the problem, which is that you need mods who are:

• fair and responsible
• willing to dedicate (potentially large) amounts of time and energy to moderating
• willing to moderate for free

That disqualifies a large swath of people from moderation.

Now of course, it’s possible and it’s happened before, Reddit has a huge number of dedicated unpaid mods and it’s because of them Reddit was able to grow to the platform it was.

But it’s a little more complex than “throw more people at the problem” when you need people who are incentivized by something other than payment.

The unfortunate problem is that once you remove money from the equation, power is the closest great incentivizer. And power hungry mods are bad mods.

Wrongly blocking people simply because a report was submitted against them, even if it’s unsubstantiated, is better than users having to do some proactive blocking/filtering?

A report has to be reviewed for accuracy, there’s still time and resources required. It’s not as simple as just blocking every post or user that has a report submitted against them. People abuse report systems all the time.

Rules are only as effective as the mechanisms enforcing them - I don’t think anyone wants ads on Lemmy instances, but removal requires moderation tools and staff (volunteer or otherwise) to review everything that’s posted.

I imagine the problem we’ll see is as growth accelerates, post velocity will outpace moderation manpower - short version, you’re always going to have to do some blocking/filtering of your own.

It’s the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.

• Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
• Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
• New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
• Community becomes “popular” enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
• New users flood in
• Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
• Community now sucks.

It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.