Conversation

the answer is “they failed”

Can you be a little more specific? Like I said, I wasn’t using it while it “failed”, so I don’t have much experience here.

you still need to have some form of collaborative filtering / moderation.

But the advantage of those sorts of systems is that you can have many more types of moderation and collaborative filtering that aren’t “a single autocrat who owns or rents the hardware has absolute control”. Such as Aether’s democracy; or Scuttlebutt’s “subjective moderation”/public blocking; or maybe a hierarchy where the person at the top (say, the founder) delegates control to moderators to run subforums but he doesn’t have direct control over those subforums, and those moderators can delegate further and so on ad infinitum, like DNS; or a normal political system but with protection against certain abuses of power, such as shadowbanning. Sure, you could try and implement something like those systems in a standard server-focused model, but the single autocrat with the hardware can break the rules any time they like.