Reddit has demonstrated that its moderation system is not stable and results in garbage. Try some different systems, for example:

1 -- The moderators pay for the privilege of moderating.

or

2 -- No moderators at all. Let me decide what I want to see via some kind of interface to an "AI thingie".

While the market valuation isn’t what it used to be, let’s not be too quick to brush off the fact that Reddit has a market cap of 6 billion dollars.

I’m not sure you’re going to convince many stakeholders that completely uprooting the golden-goose of free moderation for the site is a worthwhile venture.

Requiring moderators to pay for the right to moderate would backfire. The groups which would pay the most are political parties, foreign governments, PR firms, and corporate surrogates. All, would pretend they are “neutral” but in fact would slant things in their favor. For example, a cars sub-reddit would talk about how Brand X is “awesome” while Brand Y is “terrible”.

Allow each reader to have his own moderation. Basically, I want to be able to enforce 3 rules: 1. There are people I want to read always. 2. There are people I want to read never. 3. I want some random sample from all other people, in proportion from 1:1 to 1:1000, depending on my current mood.

The server should keep my list and serve me text according to it. Also it should allow readers to exchange such lists. If I trust some guy - he could serve as my personal moderator, but a mild one compared to the current regime - my list #1 will never be interfered with. Cheap?

I have no idea relative to paying moderators, but I'm pretty sure that destroys caching. Each person having their own server-side settings means basically every request has to be served live.

I can't imagine advertisers would be a big fan of that either.

Here's a very similar concept fleshed out in more detail.

https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/