This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance.

Saying you have no moderation is attractive to one crowd in particular (there are other people who theoretically favour it, but practically they’ll use a moderated forum anyway). So you get a quick numbers boost but you’ve now fundamentally limited your audience to people prepared to share head-space with that crowd.

Reddit, Facebook and Twitter got in early and got to spend a lot of time learning on the job. Unless you start small, you’re not going to get that luxury now.

(Please don’t take this as an endorsement of any particular moderation policy, in theory or practice. Most of them are kind of awful at times. But the problem is hard.)