Ryan Mitchell

Leonardo.ai Discord had 60K members but the server was chaotic. Prompt sharing was unorganized, new users felt lost, and toxic behavior in image channels drove a 15% monthly churn rate among active creators.

Restructured the server into themed creation channels (portraits, landscapes, product shots, etc.) with automated prompt tagging. Built a reputation system where upvoted creations earned creator levels and unlocked beta features. Launched a 300-person ambassador program across 25 countries with weekly creation challenges. Deployed custom moderation bots for NSFW filtering and spam.

Grew from 60K to 600K members in 11 months. Monthly active rate hit 42% (vs. 12% industry average for large Discord servers). Toxic behavior reports dropped 81%. The community became Leonardo's #1 acquisition channel, driving 35% of all signups.

Partner servers with 50K+ members had inconsistent moderation, leading to escalating trust & safety issues and partner departures.

Created a tiered moderation framework with automated tooling (AutoMod rules, escalation workflows) and a trained moderator certification program. Built dashboards tracking mod response times and user sentiment.

Average moderation response time dropped from 4.2 hours to 18 minutes. Partner server churn fell 45%. The framework was adopted as Discord's official recommendation for large community servers.