We don't have that problem here.
Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a moment, I used 'noise' loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white noise. In forums, our white noise is 'this' comments, and we trivially filter those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence replies, and prevent the 'post' button from working if the text is 'this' in any variant.
But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level - in the form of replies such as "RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a bit negative. We strive for better here". I see that all the time (well, not addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless, there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading.
It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don't see how that changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven't formed any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don't think I feel like participating in endorsement.
If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of 'this' comments.