I think your suggestion would lead to an echo chamber. Take a look at metafilter and how samey they've gotten. One thing to remember is that even small barriers implicity give mods much more power.
The most common form anarchic moderation (i.e. no moderation). When a forum's small, unwritten social rules keep things under control. However, as forum grows, that breaks down, and things become more chaotic.
Metafilter essentially has an authoritarian moderation culture, the rules of discussion are both made and enforced (selectively or not) by the same group on another subject group. There's a wall to keep outsiders out (the paywall). It avoids chaos, but its failure mode is ossification, devolution into an echo chamber, and eventually desertion; as public forum behavior comes to more-or-less rigidly reflect the opinions and preferences of the moderators.
Reddit's somewhere in the middle of the above two forms. There are anarchic hordes in the less moderated reaches, and little authoritarian kingdoms without the walls to keep the hordes out.
I don't think anyone's tried real democracy in a forum (with elections, politics, checks and balances, and the time investment that all entails). It'd be interesting to see how such a forum would fare, and if it could avoid chaos without become an echo chamber. Democracy isn't the public-opinion-style voting we see in forum's today, but instead actual accountability of the moderators to the users.
Not claiming this is a novel insight, but it's new to me.
In the end, the wizards published "LambdaMOO Takes Another Direction" and took back control, concluding:
> Over the course of the past three and a half years, it has become obvious that this [refraining from making social decisions] was an impossible ideal: The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be.
A great deal has been written about this experiment (and a Web search will find much analysis, along with full text of LTAND and LTAND2), and there are a wide variety of perspectives on why LTAND failed, but one conclusion that nearly everybody seems to reach is that attempting to give a community democracy with no higher guidance is almost guaranteed to be a recipe for disaster.
Reflecting on all of this, I have no idea how the US founders managed to get something that worked at all, much less as well as it does. (And notice that it took them several tries to get it right.)
I think maybe a good solution would be to (1) pay mods and (2) make everything they do transparent. This will give you better mods to start out with but also gives users the power to notice mod overreach before it spirals out of control.
I mean, yeah, it’s structured mostly around links, and you can certainly use it as a source of Interesting Links. But there’s conversation and community there if you look around a little.
Staying relatively on topic is an unrelated aspiration and one that we mostly let flex a lot depending on the specific thread and context.