Hrmmm... Reddit pays mods? It would be very interesting to know how much they get paid by reddit. We didn't know how much Twitch streamers made until that info was leaked this year, and it encouraged many others to stop wasting their time on the platform in hopes of fairness.
It seems to me that reddit mods, and even the platform, often do(does) side deals with certain accounts to allow and help posts to reach the front page as well, while reddit also fosters this with paid promotions on the site. Lots of things that make it to the front page are not likeable, but somehow embedded with political and marketing messages, that's what corrupted the overall experience of browsing reddit for me... Not proven fact, but my opinion as a web developer mind you.
People play with anonymity that social media can provide to make money, now companies also do it. If transparency isn't practiced on the corporate side, everything online becomes a carefully controlled reality show while the shady deals go on behind the curtains.
Reddit removing public metrics, like displaying both upvotes and downvotes next to each other allows brigading to go on unchecked, and it enables an ideal that certain things are popular or likeable without dispute... The ideal that things make it to the front page because they are favorable, controversial, or popular is a big lie in itself especially if the numbers aren't truly accurate and/or transparent.
Is there any reason to think that paid moderation wouldn't lead to its own (possibly worse) biases?
Could you designate a bunch of people as mini moderators and have the majority vote of mini mods decide moderation?
Then have one moderator curate the list of mini mods. By spreading the work out, more actual time can be spent on the decision and feedback given.
r/science has something like 1500 moderators, most of which only have the power to remove comments. The rules are applied seemingly at random, and the problematic posts/titles are rarely actually fixed, they just have a sea of [removed] under them. This makes the biased posts even worse as the comments correcting them and the discussion about it disappears.
It sounds like if any of the 1500 mods dislike a comment, then that comment disappears. That's extremely biased towards removing comments.
My suggestion would have those 1500 mini mods vote "keep" or "remove" - majority wins. The main mod can look at contentious votes and override the mini mods decisions. Further the main mod can remove mini mods that are voting poorly.
Coz it's cheaper to pay moderators with a power trip than with money.
I've yet to see a viable solution to this economic dilemma.
* Decentralized moderation tends to end up meaning no moderation coz normal users are not really motivated to clean up spam, etc.
* Free centralized moderation like reddit does inevitably means the space becomes a fiefdom from people who have their own reasons for doing grunt work for free (e.g. pushing their agenda, marketing, etc).
* Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.