Of course an online community can be moderated by volunteers. Many are. But this one isn’t. Many people learn that HN runs on a single dedicated server and fig

Of course an online community can be moderated by volunteers. Many are. But this one isn’t. Many people learn that HN runs on a single dedicated server and figure it costs ~$1000/month in operational costs. But my point was just that this ignores the moderation, which is a crucial feature of this community. Of course you could try to recruit volunteer moderators to do the same job. But finding and training and managing them is not easy. Nor is dealing with ideological or interpersonal conflicts. None of this stuff is easy, and just because volunteers can and have done this work, doesn’t mean that “just have volunteers do the moderation work” is a solution to successfully running a big online community.