The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more importan

The community kind of enforced its own standards (eg almost no jokes, especially no stupid Reddit-style joke threads). But I think moderation was more important. However much pg wrote about being curious or “intellectual honesty” or whatever, it was the change in moderation (to dang) that saw changes. But that sort of thing doesn’t fit all communities. For one thing this one is basically public (there’s no shared-private things like subgroups or DMs) and tends to have reasonably highly educated members. For another, the volume is low enough that dang can deal with it all with only some automated tools, giving a reasonably consistent approach to moderation. Also I think he is paid much more like a software engineer in Silicon Valley than a typical social media moderator. There are certainly some other more general things though, like the anti-flame mechanisms, the lack of more inflammatory media like pictures or videos, the lack of printed comment score and downvote limits, and the generally public moderation trail (though moderator may privately email users too).