I read @neoxian's post recently and wanted to drop some of my thoughts around it the way I see it from running a big curation project on Hive and how I think it's going to evolve over time. Was going to leave a comment first but there were quite a few other aspects of it all I wanted to cover and some I wanted to avoid (like AI) so it wouldn't have been completely related to his post.
That said, I agree that in many ways @hivewatchers team is too small and I think the decisions being done only come from a couple if only maybe 1 person trying to keep it all together while having the community help him with reports and such which still can get overwhelming for one person. I'm not sure if this is kept small on purpose to possibly maximize the rewards people in control earn from the proposal (have seen this occur with certain niche communities in our incubation that we've been wanting to and dealt with in some cases). I can speak from OCD's activities that it is quite overwhelming for me as well and we barely get much abuse going through us so I'm mostly speaking about all the curation activities which I've made sure over the years to bring more trusted curators up to "my rank" if you will in decision making and laying down opinions and rules to maintain our ways of curation and stake distribution and in the same go also share the rewards with them with personal stake in the form of delegations.
What I say next may not be true and I don't want to offend anyone from the @hivewatchers team but seeing the person I believe to be mostly in charge of the day to day it has seemed as if they're trying really hard to make it look like "they're needed". Whether that's due to the way their funding works through proposals and the stress behind that or due to the increasing dislike for the way @hivewatchers deal with certain things I personally also don't agree with, it has seemed like logic has been trying extra hard to be heard in different chats literally spamming many unrelated channels with random abuse findings, account creation abuse, plagiarism and lately AI. The reason I've even picked up on this is because we've also added abuse reporting onto OCD since a while ago, among other anti-abuse tools and it's become quite a headache to wake up, find a curator having reported certain posts we've curated to be from an abusive author to then open up the other chats and see logic dm'ing or bringing the same case up in other channels. The daily dejavu's have made it look as though logic/hivewatchers don't really spend much time into finding abuse, but more dealing with it from reports and then for some reason being super loud about it and shoving it in everyone's face which has gotten to become very annoying over time. I know guiltyparties has attempted to control it but to no avail, but either way it is what it is but it brings me to my next point as to how I see abuse fighting go down over time.
Communities.
Similar to how we run our community incubation program within OCD where we invite the creator of a niche community, let's say for instance a community about knitting. The creator of the community obviously has to know about knitting to have had interest in creating and running it, her curators and helpers/moderators have obviously been picked because they share the same interest which means they're also experienced in knitting. So when it comes to curating posts from the community involving knitting, they're very knowledgeable about it and even though we're in the early stages of "everyone/most get participation trophies/votes" there are some posts where they may request bigger votes to land on them due to the quality, mastery and potential effort behind certain knitting projects the authors have presented.
My point is that these people are experienced and know a lot about the niche, which means that over time they will be the best to also find abuse within the category. This means that eventually I think communities, with the help of curation projects and the tools that communities bring to the table, they'll be the most efficient abuse fighters within their own niche that no one else will be able to compete against. They won't just be good at finding abuse but they'll also be more experienced and hands down with the authors posting in their community, they may pick up on things that would bypass others such as "I've read this author many times before but his/her new post seems like quite the leap in language/detail/knowledge, something's off"
These aren't things normal curators would be able to pick out because they're more about general curation and possibly better at detecting general abuse which they can also help the community curators with.
On top of it all, the people behind a certain community who've worked hard to grow and maintain it are going to be a lot more caring about their users and guide them towards betterment than the black & white ruleset we see hivewatchers run with these days. Where even once forgetting about sourcing anything means you have to join their discord, jump over hoops to do certain appeals and if they refuse or don't respond they're instantly blacklisted. I don't think it's a surprise that most new users will just avoid doing all that and just leave, often to never look back at Hive again and miss out on quite a lot and our chain missing out on an avalanche of potential value if the user hadn't done a certain mistake that is so common and normal in most other web2's.
I've personally always been a bit more lenient when it comes to abuse, it doesn't mean I'm being naive and take too kindly on those purposely trying to abuse the rewardspool over and over. I think a good example of this was a recent abuse report that I stumbled upon in ocd where a curator mentioned that a user had been found plagiarising on a post a year or so ago and that they shouldn't get curated by us because they never appealed to hivewatchers. Taking a quick glance at the account you could see most of the recent content was quite original, he hasn't been receiving a lot of support but had maintained consistent posting and from what I saw no further abuse/plagiarism had occurred since. This was something I found a bit too bizarre to avoid curating a user for a mistake ages ago that they probably learned from and didn't repeat. Just because they didn't want to go over the often-times ridiculous asks of hivewatchers doesn't mean they don't deserve curation in my opinion and I think a lot of the issues people have with hivewatchers may come from the same root of the problem. They're often too strict, ask for too much to "get off the blacklist" or "get unbanned" (the fact people even use the word ban on this chain is dumb) and it's clear that this most of the time will chase people off the chain rather than help them improve and try again. Feels like some people are way too strict when it comes to the reward pool all the while a lot of it goes to so much dumb stuff in my opinion along with overrewarded content/authors that I really question if these abuse-fighting do more good than harm over time.
It kind of reminds me of the prison systems, more so the private for-profit ones in the U.S. where cops try their hardest to fill their quota so they can fill the prison's up it often strikes me as similar activity with for profit abuse-fighting and considering how much of a big deal it keeps becoming, the drama around the way the abuse-fighting occurs, etc.
I think over time, and this may be something we'd be happy to experiment with with OCD, would be to reward people for "moderation" of communities rather than directly rewarding people for finding and dealing with abuse. It shouldn't be a "go out and find abuse then bring it here to claim your reward" but more of a "hey thanks for curating, moderating and taking care of the community, here's a reward" which we've tried to do with our incubation, onboarding and other curation activities and I think it's been working rather well. We may experiment a bit more in the near future with having communities report to us when they find abuse and in turn possibly get higher curation of their daily/weekly reports which is our way of incentivizing their work that often goes unnnoticed and underappreciated.
I'm not saying we have to completely remove something like hivewatchers, there's plenty of abuse that is also good at remaining undected/hidden from the usual places curators and stakeholders aren't looking at such as certain tags rather than communities or communities that accept any and all kind of posts that often get overwhelmed with posts, but having more people/communities deal with them on their own accord rather than hivewatchers being at the helm acting as an authority and requesting everyone to go through them with reports and have them deal with it in their ways.
Anyway, this might be a bit rambly and not thought through properly but wanted to share my thoughts and what things seem to look like from my perspective these days.