I am an anarchist, so the idea of the community doing all the work, creating content, and then mods basically ruling over them as a reward, just doesn't sit right with me.
We the users should collectively be in control of all our social media, economically and with regards of controling what goes on, on there.
All social media get's its value from the users i.e. the network effect. However the users are subjected to a hierachical place where individuals in power act as tyrants.
We create the value we should be in charge.
Fellow Lemmings how can we create social media were the users are king/queen?
post Scriptum: just having a voting mechanism, might be gamed by unsavory charcters or groups to game such a system, unless voting requires your clear name id, which comes with other issues of course.
I don't think there is a technological silver bullet, but technology might enable you to overcome your concerns. Reading other answers and your comments, one concern seems to be the inability to influence mods once they are in their post. That seems easy enough to address through community voting implemented and enforced by the software.
What your really need to do is sit down and game out the situations and actions you need, and that becomes the basis for your functional software spec.
The bigger issue is who runs the software and on what hardware? Implementing safeguards to keep server admins in line with the community would be much more difficult than mods.
could this maybe be adressed through the use of peer to peer technology similar to bittorrent?