The problem with scaling an internet community is that you need human hands to keep things running smoothly.
Algorithmic filters can’t maintain brand/values/atmosphere. But to really scale you need more humans than you can reasonably afford to pay.
It’s a careful dance: paying moderators/volunteers what they’re worth individually would be insulting, because their value is aggregate.
So you end up relying on paid intermediaries that wrangle the [important but essentially replaceable] volunteers.
This isn’t a critique of one site, just a pattern that has been repeating in online communities since, man. The 80s? The 70s?
In conclusion, anything worth using or consuming requires human labor. How we value and compensate that labor is very, very complicated.
Sometimes the complication & fuzziness is deliberately exploited for profit, other times that labor is squeezed by the expectation of ‘free’