Moderation is labor and you get what you pay for. Which is not that crowd-moderation cannot work, but that for good crowd-moderation you still have to treat it

Moderation is labor and you get what you pay for. Which is not that crowd-moderation cannot work, but that for good crowd-moderation you still have to treat it as a labor pool, have a very good idea of how you are incentivizing/paying for it, and what "metrics/qualities" those incentives are designed to optimize for. (In some cases it actually is far cheaper to pay a small moderator pool a good wage than to pay an entire community a bad wage to "crowd-moderate" if you actually test the business plan versus alternatives.)