I don’t know where I read that for a social network, the actual product is the moderation. If you manage to moderate well enough your social network, it may grow.

The problem is that for a large community there is no other way than having an army of mods to moderate stuff. And reddit mods are not paid so it ends up attracting some amount of power hungry people. That’s how they are paid, power.

So I definitely understand why a community would want to stay small. You can moderate a small instance with a tight team. Moderation will also stay more consistent since all mods know each other.