There is no "fix", IMHO - just as in physical societies, maintaining infrastructure takes a lot of boring work that never ends as long as people still use it.

There is no "fix", IMHO - just as in physical societies, maintaining infrastructure takes a lot of boring work that never ends as long as people still use it. That said... There were and are a lot of things that could make it less frustrating. Once again, we can look at physical societies: if 99% of people litter and .001% of people sweep up after them, the latter are gonna have a rough time. If we can increase the size of the latter group that'll help somewhat - but so will reducing the size of the former, and if there's less of a crushing workload then increasing the number of workers may get easier too. Stack Overflow is entirely moderated by volunteers, and their numbers haven't exactly scaled with the volume of casual users. I find it interesting to look at how moderation changes around major holidays - especially Christmas and New Years Day: suddenly there is much less work to do, and more of it gets done - but not only done, done well! Folks are happier, more relaxed, more... Friendly and helpful. For years, Stack Overflow's management has looked at discussions like this one and said to themselves, "those damned volunteers are making us look bad, we've gotta make their work harder so they stop screwing this up". And... It has had precisely the opposite effect: more litter, fewer sweepers == increasingly hostile interactions with those who remain to push the brooms. I strongly suspect a campaign to encourage a bit more... Civic pride... "This site belongs to all of us, pick up after yourself", etc. Might've done more good.