I guess one option could be don’t make a commitment you don’t have time to fulfill.
Let the voting system do its job of crowdsourcing the suppression of unhelpful content.
When I was on reddit it was just a fact that there’d be a pile of trash accumulated at the bottom of each thread, made of comments that were stupid or toxic and collapsed because their score was negative. That layer of shit at the bottom was well-hidden and didn’t interfere with the productive discussion happening above.
The voting system to suppress content suppresses reasonable views and ends up with highly upvoted nazi shit. Not because everyone is a Nazi (arguable) but because nazis have a motivation to push an agenda.
If Nazi shit is highly upvoted, then the community is already lost.
The voting system works, for the most part. Moderation is just to get rid of the early comment bullshit, or cull the already downvoted to hell posts.
I really don't understand when moderators burn entire comment trees or lock threads. It defeats the purpose of the whole system, and makes it look like the community can't do its job.
Honestly, it really sounds like you don’t understand moderation on Reddit. The admins can and will come in a couple days later, see that you didn’t handle the removal of content deemed against sitewide rules, then hold the moderation team accountable for not handling it.
Once in a while, or during a huge influx is fine. But repeated “slips” results in the admins taking action against the sub itself, and in certain cases even the mods who are ignoring the problem.
The voting system only serves to push people's biases to the top. 98% of the top-rated comments on Reddit are worse than trash because they misinform, or are a regurgitation of a commonly-accepted half-truth.
Yeeeeah… uh, the problem is that the community I was moderating was formerly pretty unmoderated. A loooot of racist and transphobic shit got upvoted.
“Letting the votes handle it” also doesn’t stop Reddit from seeing reports go unresolved, and action against the sub.
I get where your coming from, but you’re essentially saying “let the racism run rampant if you don’t have the time to manually review every comment on a post, you should have dedicated a few hours of your work day to this.”