It amazes me how many people keep trying to solve the problem "how to make a community that doesn't suck?"

• BBS: cult of high post count regulars, endless "game" threads with little real content, flame wars, fluff to content ratio is extremely skewed
• SomethingAwful: tried to filter out crap with 10bux and heavy bans, some good things came out of it, but still mostly mediocre and not really worth the 10+bux.
• 4chan: tried to put more emphasis on content over status with anonymity and light moderation, kinda backfired in that people take this to mean free reign to be the worst version of themselves. Plus they have little incentive to put effort into their posts.
• Facebook: wow, turns out drama is even worse when it's people you know!
• Twitter: The platform inherently favors "hot takes", one-liner jokes, and knee-jerk reactions over any kind of thoughtful discussion.
• Digg/Reddit: tried to filter discussion with upvote/downvotes. Sometimes works but tends to just make the most banal hivemind obvious opinion get upvoted, since upvotes/downvotes are misused as "agree/disagree" buttons. Also suffers from the snowball effect where upvoted content is seen by more people and thus upvoted even more.
• IRC/Discord: can be good depending on the community, but the nature of chat means that posts tend to be short, frivolous, and typed without much thought involved.
• Diaspora/Ello/Google Plus: evidently didn't offer enough advantages over existing systems to get people to switch.

I think the lesson here is that it doesn't matter how many restrictions and innovations and bells and whistles you throw onto a platform, the core problem remains: most people are boring at best and toxic at worst.