Way back in 2008, we had Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit, on the Stack Overflow podcast. We chatted about a bunch of stuff, but one of the things they said that always stuck with me was that Reddit always took an explicitly hands-off, no moderation approach to their content from the very beginning.
I found that a bit shocking, since I’ve… never seen that work. Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation — and more so with every passing year. We have literally hundreds of community moderators. We spend …