Of course not all 2k were active but the server definitely had a very active and dedicated core of users and we had many newbies joining almost everyday. The worst I remember, actually, was when one of our admins decided to promote the project on TikTok (for some reason) and his content was blessed by the algorithm. It was a literal meat grinder.

I'm not sure if there was even something that could have been automated. Like, of course you could automate banning raiders or spammers, iirc we had that, but what is there to automate when you're dealing with plain xenophobia/racism/homophobia (and this was not a rare occasion)? Introducing word filters might work in some contexts but this was not the case since it was a very multilingual server. Well, server-wide filters would be useless, channel-wide filters could be helpful, though, but I doubt there is a way to implement them without bots, unless Discord introduced such capabilities.

Good to hear that a lot has now changed for the better though but it would not really improve my experience back then simply because the community of discord servers can sometimes be pretty awful. Maybe it'll go away as Discord is getting way more mainstream nowadays but even just a few years ago it was a very specific kind of people that joined Discord and they were not always nice.