Do social networks stand a chance against infiltration? With the high turnover of moderators, it's easy to get somebody on the inside to get to know the inner workings of the moderation process.
A different business model that 1) requires less moderators and 2) makes money so you can pay the remaining moderators enough that they actually stick around for longer and are less prone to bribery.
1 can be achieved by making it costly to break the rules. If new accounts have fees and privileges that accumulate over time (such as being able to post links, upload media, etc basically anything that is prone to abuse) then people will be less likely to break the rules since creating a new account will cost them money and time having to "level up" the new account before it can be useful again. This raises the cost of spamming dramatically and will often make it unprofitable.
Stack Exchange has a model of this where new accounts with little "reputation" can't do much and are heavily rate-limited & unable to post links/images and gaining reputation involves contributing to the community which makes spam significantly harder. The same "reputation" system is used to encourage people to moderate the community (in a way that requires input from multiple people & fully transparent, so misuse is hard and will be easily detected).
2 involves making money which means "growth & engagement" goes out the window and you need to charge for the service. Not being based on "growth & engagement" means you can also achieve 1 because you can now be selective with the kinds of people & content you accept.
> it's easy to get somebody on the inside to get to know the inner workings of the moderation process.
Knowing the process shouldn't be a problem. Ideally the process should already be public - aka the list of "rules" one should abide by when joining the community.
This is a non-problem that forums from back in the day managed to solve on a much lower (often zero) budget. It's only a problem when your business model is "growth & engagement".
I don't understand why there isn't a protocol like email, but for "social media". Something like that combined with decentralized moderation ie you pay x group to filter out trash from public feeds and use that as default. Not happy with that moderation? Pick another one.
