There are often problems with Reddit moderators, but at least you know who they are (sort of) and can talk to them. It seems like this there is a better relationship between moderators and a community when the moderators are part of the community, versus being an anonymous horde of interchangeable personnel.

(And of course there is Hacker News for another example, combining some automatic stuff with manual control.)

To get this at scale, though, it seems like you need a larger social network to be divided into many smaller ones in some logical way that’s understood by by everyone involved.

It seems like the inherent hierarchy (authors versus subscribers) and subdivision of Substack is likely to work out well for them.