I ran public forums in a previous business. Customers paid us every month for other services; the forum was just a side benefit. It was great when we had arou

I ran public forums in a previous business. Customers paid us every month for other services; the forum was just a side benefit. It was great when we had around 1000 people able to post. Not all did of course, but it remained civil. Once there were around 2000, a small "gang" of troublemakers formed. Not many people, maybe 10. But they monopolized the board posts, especially if we did something they didn't like, for example, raised fees. It degraded very rapidly after that until we had to close them. I would have like to try some simple automated moderation. Real moderation IMO doesn't work, for lots of reasons: a) it's personal for the person being moderated; b) it doesn't scale; c) it isn't uniform. One thing I wanted to try was to severely limit posts, like to once/day. My reasoning was: - it keeps a few people from going round and round arguing and trying to convince each other they are right. This quickly get boring for others who are only reading - it gives everyone a chance to give their opinion rather than being drowned out by someone with more time and/or energy to post. Having more time+energy to post does not mean a person's ideas are better (IMO it's more the opposite). The difficulty is in verifying a person uses only 1 account or a business account and personal account. That was easy for us because they paid every month for other services, but will be hard for Twitter, especially considering privacy concerns.