Go into any crypto related community and wait a day until the spam bots start bombarding your with DMs. Sometime stupid, sometimes downright well done scam. Sometimes things you are expect to answer. No visual difference there if you don't know all the verification bots by name & Id. In my point of view it's a dangerous platform because of the lack of general moderation.

It shouldn't be the server owners problem to repeat the same lines warning against the same things again and again because they lack actual control.

"Allow direct messages from server members" is a setting you can control. You can toggle it per server, and also set the default for new servers you join. This is more control than the IRC protocol offers - you can globally ignore all private messages there, or permit them. (You can also block individual users, of course, which you could also do with IRC). Private message spam is also a thing on IRC (though there it tends to be the "lonely women in your area" sort rather than crypto).

This really feels like a social problem, not a technical one; and not one specific to Discord, though it sounds like you have encountered some particularly bad communities there.

> Go into any crypto related community

Lie down with dogs, and get fleas.

> What's the problem with moderation?

The OP mentioned a bunch of problems spawning from the platform's lack of moderation, among which there's spam and scams.

OP didn't mention discord at all. Do you mean my post's parent? They said "because nobody but discord can actually moderate", which is counter to my experience; therefore my post asking for clarification. I'm keen to understand what the moderation tasks are that discord can accomplish that the users who are discord server admins cannot; perhaps I will learn something new, or perhaps I may be able share something I know.

Certainly, as I mentioned, I do see problems with scams and spamming in some communities due to the admins of those communities choosing not to moderate, or not knowing/caring that it is possible, but those problems do not seem specific to discord - IRC also had them, as do other platforms. Hence my confusion.