Well, communities haven't also existed at the scale and pace they do online. Plus in the real world people had to go eat, and could come back with cooler heads. Online you end up seeing that incendiary piece of text and lose your mind all over again.
As someone mentioned elsewhere - like the media and news industry, there is a Gentleman's agreement in moderation to do "good". There are few ways to punish people for breaking that rule.
Subs with strict moderation end up doing "good" for their communities. The measurement everyone lacks is whether the good of creating insular communities is offset by the harm done to the larger ability to share ideas.
And people really can go ahead and try to prove this - the whole corpus of reddit data is available, if you can come up with the toolkit to test this people could put empirical evidence to these questions.
It is also a question on how you can create balancing forces for moderator overreach. However that sounds laughably expensive. Reddit sure as heck would not want to become a court of judgement where bad mods are censured (even though they have to do it every day).
Fact is you need humans to handle humans, and humans are expensive. No one wants to pay, and debugging deception in human interactions is painful.
Far easier to talk about the marketplace of ideas and put a lid on the whole mess.
As someone mentioned elsewhere - like the media and news industry, there is a Gentleman's agreement in moderation to do "good". There are few ways to punish people for breaking that rule.
Subs with strict moderation end up doing "good" for their communities. The measurement everyone lacks is whether the good of creating insular communities is offset by the harm done to the larger ability to share ideas.
And people really can go ahead and try to prove this - the whole corpus of reddit data is available, if you can come up with the toolkit to test this people could put empirical evidence to these questions.
It is also a question on how you can create balancing forces for moderator overreach. However that sounds laughably expensive. Reddit sure as heck would not want to become a court of judgement where bad mods are censured (even though they have to do it every day).
Fact is you need humans to handle humans, and humans are expensive. No one wants to pay, and debugging deception in human interactions is painful.
Far easier to talk about the marketplace of ideas and put a lid on the whole mess.