I think a useful somewhat-apples-to-apples comparison for moderation is: Quora and StackExchange. Both websites are intended to be Q&A platforms, but their appr

I think a useful somewhat-apples-to-apples comparison for moderation is: Quora and StackExchange. Both websites are intended to be Q&A platforms, but their approach is markedly different and results in different moderation issues. Quora is heavily centralized - all content must be moderated by the company, there is little to no segregation of questions by dedicated community, and all questions are allowed. Individual users must be name-identified and, importantly, are the core ingredient for Quora - people come to read the content of specific people, not for quality of the content in general. Users have stake but no say in the evolution of the system, and are by design incentivised to not care about question or answer quality but instead about the people they engage with. Further, questions are considered to be "owned by everyone" - so users are free to alter questions indefinitely. In contrast, StackExchange (not StackOverflow) has similar properties to Reddit - partitioned into smaller communities, reliant on user moderation, equipped with a somewhat reasonable appeals process that relies on a "meta" site where users can contribute to improving the site. Users have both stake and say, and importantly are dedicated to improving the average quality of answers rather than who is answering. The difference in moderation is stark. Quora's issues with moderation have been legendary - anywhere from an inability to stop sockpuppet voting, pay-to-upvote rings, and reversing helpful edits to outright refusing to take action against documented sexual harassment by users against other users. StackExchange has had no such issues, or rather it has had vanishingly fewer issues compared to Quora. While we obviously can't compare them on equal footing, given that the sites are so different, this is some circumstantial evidence that community moderation, allowing communities to manage their evolution, and removing the focus on individuals is a better experience between two sites that seek to accomplish the same goal. I'm not sure what this would say about social networks - which are all about emphasis on other people - but it does seem like a great model for online communities that aren't social network focused.