> In the replies of a March 2 Tesla forum post announcing the 13-day countdown until the platform’s demise, one commenter with supposed “inside info” alleged that the forums were closing because Tesla couldn’t afford to hire multiple full-time moderators to keep up with the barrage of spam and trolls that would frequent the threads.

Truly amazed at the number of companies that set up social platforms like this and then refuse to actually moderate them in any way. While it's obvious Tesla "could afford" to moderate it, it's also probably the kind of line-item no one actually considered being part of running a forum. I'm sure they think of a forum's overhead as just being hosting and maintenance, without considering the human cost of moderation until they were forced to, at which point they said "eh, fuck it."

We all talk about the moderation problem a lot with massive platforms like Facebook, but the number of people who just think "let's just throw up a small little forum/Reddit clone/Discord channel for people to talk to each other on" and then don't consider that, maybe, there might be some bad actors on there, is... I dunno, the majority, it seems.

Maybe it's because I grew up posting on forums like Something Awful that were famed for strong moderation, and IRC channels with as many ops as lurkers, but it almost seems like this was a weird forgotten aspect of building social platforms. I kinda blame the proliferation of upvotes and downvotes, which people seem to think is a replacement for moderation.