I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the "thundering hordes of assholes"[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to "moderate" is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such "solutions" can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can't build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don't show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes.
I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.
[1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.
I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.
[1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.