I think it's impossible to scale without a loss of quality, and I don't necessarily see it as a problem for SN (unlike Facebook, or twitter etc), because we have technical and social solutions to mitigate this situation, for example, zapping for high quality posts, or the ideas suggested here: 

A_bit_of_Good_News

I get the impression that SN publications quality is somewhat lower

satdesigner

I think it's impossible to scale without a loss of quality, and I don't necessarily see it as a problem for SN (unlike Facebook, or twitter etc), because we have technical and social solutions to mitigate this situation, for example, zapping for high quality posts, or the ideas suggested here: https://stacker.news/items/394207/r/erict875?commentId=394300