Stack Exchange attempts to solve this using three methods: their “reputation” method (gamification), elections, and paid moderators. If you can prove to the community you’d be good, you and a few others are “elected” community moderators (happens once a year?). If you get 10k reputation on a single site, you get access to those moderator tools as well.
And for those with less, you get a smaller set of the tools. For example, IIRC, the “close votes queue” is unlocked at 3k(?). It seems to work well enough.
