Good question, especially as Blind was a big "inspiration" for us (in that we wanted to build something explicitly not like Blind).
I think there are 2 things here:
1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.
2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.
Thanks so much for the great feedback and consuming our content! The Taro app definitely has a long way to go, and we're also investing a lot into the web app right now as we know that a lot of folks prefer to consume professional content on their desktop.
Taro is very early, and we know that a lot of product right now sucks. If you or anyone else here has any feedback, we're all ears at [email protected]!
I think there are 2 things here: 1. The paywall creates a positive "walled garden" effect - Very few people are going to spend $50+ just to come in and be a jerk. The paywall alone should do a lot of work making sure that folks who come in are positive and non-toxic.
2. Heavy moderation - Rahul and I actually built a free version of this software engineer community called Tech Career Growth (https://www.linkedin.com/company/techcareergrowth/), which was the inspiration for us taking the model freemium so we could quit our jobs to pursue this passion full-time after the community grew to 15,000+ members. Despite its size, we were able to moderate it very well with almost no instances of toxicity (more spam than anything) through a combination of empowering other community champions, having a clear code of conduct, and a 0 tolerance policy for the kind of abuse you see on Blind. Taro Premium will naturally be more limited in terms of user numbers as it's paywalled, so we're pretty confident we can scale a positive atmosphere for quite a while (10k+ members) as that's something we've already done with the much more open Tech Career Community.