And it was contained. If you have a small group, you can manage an asshole or two, sometimes it can even be endearing ("he's an asshole, but he's our asshole"). Once the numbers start going up the toxicity increases by orders of magnitude. It's impossible to moderate. The benefits nearly all fall away and the negatives are amplified. Add on the smartest people in the world working very hard to get everyone, including children, addicted to social media and it's fucking nefarious.

> Once the numbers start going up the toxicity increases by orders of magnitude. It's impossible to moderate.

As someone who spent an embarrassingly long time on what lots of people claim to be the most toxic forum in the world (not sure about that, it's the biggest in the Nordics though, that's for sure), and even moderated some categories on that forum that many people wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, it really isn't that hard to moderate even when the topics are sensitive and most users are assholes.

I'd argue that moderation is difficult today on lots of platforms because it's happening too much "on the fly" so you end up with moderators working with the rules differently and applying them differently, depending on mood/topic/whatever.

If you instead make a hard list of explicit rules, with examples, and also establish internal precedents that moderators can follow, a lot of the hard work around moderation basically disappears, regardless of how divisive the topic is. But it's hard and time-consuming work, and requires careful deliberation and transparent ruling.

Ah, this reminds me of the one asshole on the old car forum I used to heavily participate in, who would tell new users how dumb all their ideas were for modifying their cars were. And yes, some would argue back, and then someone else would step in and point out all the threads from the cranky asshole where he'd already tried everything they were suggesting.