[ZainRiz]

The tools for a community to self-moderate is the key here, along with communities being able to define their own boundaries.

Reddit communities with active moderators are often great places to have respectful conversations. Twitter, on the other extreme, has virtually zero moderation tools for any group. You get to live with whatever rules Twitter sets for the entire platform (and die by the group that's able to hack them)

[majormajor]

The biggest question for me right now is "can Reddit [or similar] survive hordes of generative AI spam/troll/abuse bots without changing to a paid membership model?"

I don't know if the current tools are up to the task.

[ZainRiz]

Good point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a paid membership, but it would need some type of reputation formation. Ability to pay money is one way to grant you a "prob not a bot" reputation.

There's many other ways to set reputation thought:

- I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you

- StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past

- Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model.

I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered