Okay, now we are back where we started. How does that 'someone else' moderate content at scale? Eventually someone has to take the burden.

If we're all bunched into small communities, there is no 'at scale'.

I regularly hang out in several different communities of thousands of people, including this one. All of them, except the really small ones, have one or a few people who moderate the forums, and ways to report things that are posted. If someone posts a link to disturbing video to HN, it's going to disappear right quick; even if the source lives on. If I try out a community where there's a lot of disturbing videos posted, I'm going to stop going there; but other people might go there specifically because of those video links. If the videos are legal, that's their business and none of mine; I don't want to see it, and by avoiding their community, I won't.

I think it basically looks like Reddit. You carve up the site into fiefdoms and then have users self-moderate. Moderation that happens at the site layer largely targets fiefdoms rather than users.

New accounts are easy to create, but new communities are harder because you have to wait for members. Plus most of your moderators are free. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit only pays for people to moderate the default subs since advertisers and new users are more likely to see them.

They do if you use their email. All email systems are unusable without spam and origin filtering.

They also are unusable with spam and origin filtering. Not getting a message you were waiting for? Turns no message from that service is getting through, no notification, no nothing.

This is actually true, I can’t get any email for one specific Substack I paid for (and others work!). And since they do login by email I can’t log in at all.

Spam filtering is "keep you from seeing things you don't want to see". Moderation is "keep you from seeing things I don't want to show you".

That's not true. It's more that spam is automatic, and as such is easy to automate away. If someone replies "BUY MY PRODUCT http://product.link" on every post, that's spam. If someone is consistently shitty to other community members and generally acts like an asshole, that's someone who needs to be moderated away.

I partly agree. There's a skill and a moral quality internal to moderation, which means that good moderators will exclude the content they judge the community doesn't want without letting this judgement be swayed by their personal agenda. But bad moderation, where the moderator lacks the skill or the quality to do this, is very much a thing.