The how is simple - 50 people on a semi-private system is a totally different league than Reddit, with millions of users and public. Similar to your 4-rules stance, Reddit has Reddiquette and Content Policy and for the most part, people obey the policy. It's at the fringes where there are problems. It's not the one Satanist that's the issue, it's when there are large groups of members in the Church of Satan who don't get along with members of the Satanic Temple who don't get along with fringe Scientologists. (Because mainstream Scientology wasn't kooky enough for them.) And then trying to force them to split a pie that's not big enough for everyone to have a slice.

50 people is 48 more members than are in my video game clan, so I can admire the community building. The problem space changes drastically when scaling up though.