I too was a moderator years ago for a Stack Exchange site. I was always amazed by the sheer amount of tooling that I had access to. I could instantly tell when

I too was a moderator years ago for a Stack Exchange site. I was always amazed by the sheer amount of tooling that I had access to. I could instantly tell when there were sock-puppet accounts, voting rings, auto-flagged low-value postings, etc. One thing that Stack Exchange does very differently from other sites is that they emphasize professionalism. Since Facebook and YouTube allow memes and off-topic material, there is an expectation that low-value postings will be tolerated by the community. And that's exactly what those places get. SE sites prohibit garbage. On the Quant Finance site, for example, we required people who post there to actually work in the industry. That metric made it very easy to distinguish ourselves from other QF forums; we didn't have "How do I become a quant?" or "What programming language should I use?" for every other question. Another community that has some bar of professionalism is Hacker News. There's no requirement that people be entrepreneurs or programmers here, but there is an expectation that anything posted must valuable and high quality.