I think the one thing we can say confidently at this time is channels that rely exclusively on manual moderation by one person tend to have very stale main feeds. Not pointing any fingers but have seen it quite a bit now. If you don't have the bandwidth or the team to moderate, better to leave it to the algo.

Why we decided to go down the channel bot software route

1. More flexibility because of multiple, iterating and competing offerings

2. Revealed preference is most channel mods don't want to do moderation work

#2 is ultimately what took down google plus.  I used to have a massive community 250K+ on there and that experience scared me off from starting channels here.

I am a maker. I communicate through photos. Also do metal casting, 3d prints,
AI, robotics and mashups of all of these things.
http://tmophoto.com


Could you elaborate what happened? I remember circles but nothing beyond that.

Computational biologist, data scientist, digital artist | 
https://clauswilke.art/links | Hosting /ai-art & /clauswilke

infighting between mods for channel control, massive spam problem that turned into a porn spam problem, no moderation tools, huge amount of workload for mods and it was all unpaid.

Reminds me of early days of irc, well early days for me anyways. It was fun as a teenager but would not want to do it as an adult