I’m a bit of a broken record about this point so my apologies to those of you have already seen this, but what is so baffling about this whole situation is that Reddit aggressively attacked one of its core, major competitive advantages over other social media sites.

Facebook, Twitter, etc. have to pay tons of money to hire full-time content moderators, nearly all of which need mental health plans and burn out incredibly quickly because of the horrific things they see online. Reddit stumbled across a solution by letting moderators create and run their own communities, effectively outsourcing all of that need across tens of thousands of people who need absolutely no financial support. Edit: These people self select out for their own tolerance and establish community guidelines that attract a community that values those standards.

Additionally, because the way moderators run the show such as use of various (now defunct) 3PA’s, coupled with Reddit’s own structure, a lot of the most awful content is filtered before a real person even sees it, let alone a user. Auto mod, account age requirements, keywords that trigger mod actions, you name it. There are several tiers of filtering that happen before a post makes it onto a sub, especially on the larger ones. Other sites cannot replicate it at the size they are at, at least not easily and without a ton of investment and time.