zlacker

Moderation isn't supposed to prevent illegal content, law enforcement is. So that's out of scope. The harassment problem is supposed to prevent harassment, but this is just a failure of reddit to provide the correct moderation tools to block organized harassment, not a failure of the concept.

>>fallin+(OP)
Do you want cops filtering through all online sites looking for child porn? Do you think that's a good use for their time?

It's the threat of law enforcement that leads people who run websites to remove illegal content.

Generically (to, say, please advertisers) that is an expectation that sites are going to be proactive about removing offensive (or illegal) material. Simply responding on a "whack-a-mole" basis is not good enough. I ran a site that had something like 1-in-10,000 offensive (not illegal... but images of dead nazis, people with terrible tumors on their genitals, etc.) images and that was not clean enough for Adsense. From the viewpoint of quality control, particularly the Deming viewpoint of statistical quality control, it is an absolute bear of a problem to find offensive images at that level -- and look at how many people write a paper about some A.I. program that gets 70% accuracy is state of the art.