[colejohnson66]

I don’t think there’s really a good solution here... Anyone can go rogue anytime.

Stack Exchange attempts to solve this using three methods: their “reputation” method (gamification), elections, and paid moderators. If you can prove to the community you’d be good, you and a few others are “elected” community moderators (happens once a year?). If you get 10k reputation on a single site, you get access to those moderator tools as well.

And for those with less, you get a smaller set of the tools. For example, IIRC, the “close votes queue” is unlocked at 3k(?). It seems to work well enough.

[fjabre]

Paying your mods. There's a novel idea!

Absolutely agree these systems can work when designed the right way. Reddit has designed its system as punitive.

[colejohnson66]

Yep. AFAIK, some of SE’s employees are assigned to work as mods