The "dang" model where the moderators get paid a salary for their work seems the only reasonable and fair way to go.
Having mods work for free is effectively a form of psychological abuse, taking advantage of people's social media addiction for corporate benefit.
Having an army of willing volunteers helps, but it's not good enough because these are unpaid, untrained people without the psychological helplines that professional moderators have. I hope Reddit has good tooling to prevent the volunteers from seeing the worst of it.
That said, I do think that everyone contributing their time to social media like this should get a cut from the revenue; I'm 100% confident Reddit has exact numbers for the value per subreddit and even per post, so they can apply math and give the moderators a percentage of that, and even the posters of good posts.
I mean yeah then you get the problem of reposts and simple copiers, but that's already an issue, it's just that the issue is karma instead of money.
> Harassment
> Threatening violence
> Hate
> Sexualization of minors
> Sharing personal information
> Non-consensual intimate media
> Prohibited transaction
> Impersonation
> Copyright violation
> Trademark violation
> Self-harm or suicide
> Spam
Those moderators aren't doing their work for free, so why should anyone else?
Because they actively volunteer to do so.