Incentive is tough. You end up with a percentage of toxic moderators in people who are looking to fill a social need in their lives, burning themselves out "volunteering", or people looking for power or status and internet points. It's one of the cases where a steem like cryptocurrency could work to correct for the toxic incentives, but nobody's figured out how to make it work yet.

> So’s Reddit, though. I’ve become skeptical of the sort of people who volunteer to moderate.

This depends heavily on the sub.

And in this case you have an even better alternative to bad moderators. If they're bad on Reddit you can start your own sub but then you have to convince everyone there to move. With filter lists, you can start your own filter list for the same community and any subset of members can use it without having to fork the community itself. If you do a better job, yours will be more popular.

You can also potentially have filter lists by category. One is for true spam, i.e. commercial solicitation by for-profit entities and scammers. The other is for trolls and shitposters. You might think a moderator is overly aggressive in classifying things as trolls but still want the spam filtering, and then you can.

Agreed. Never giving power to anyone who wants power is usually the right choice.

I'd rather use a karma based moderation system, which works on the premise that the majority of people isn't made of trolls, spammers, scammers and the like.

reddit is cabal-moderated, or moderated in the same way as prison gangs moderate their communities

Me too!