Perhaps those of us who have been here more than a year are less interested in giving up than you are, and view a discussion of "what to do about this" as a reason to discuss change instead of throwing in the towel.

We're discussing how one man's spam is another man's treasure... and the fact that the site already handles this problem. How that leads to the maxim "For meaningful discussion, some form of top-down moderation absolutely is required" is beyond me. And I don't need to ask myself shit - I was a default mod on Reddit for like six years. I've had lengthy conversations about moderation and social design with every manager Reddit had from 2008 until 2015. So rather than ask, I'll tell you what's wrong with top down moderation:

Eventually the number of people that didn't add outnumbered the people who did, and the only people interested in governance left are either (A) young and inexperienced or (B) power-hungry. Facebook works because their moderators are paid.

Of course small communities work on Reddit. Small communities work anywhere. The trick is in going from a small community to a large one, where Reddit falls down catastrophically... and I say that as someone who moderated 7 million users at a time. When I talk about the problems of top-down moderation I speak from experience. When you talk about "localized power" you reveal your naivete as to the system - the site-wide blacklists, the collusion, the crowdsourced spam .xml files, all the other stuff that has sprung up ad hoc to deal with the fact that Reddit Inc doesn't pay people nearly enough to manage this stuff so there isn't nearly the core of Admins necessary. Hubski will never go there. EVER. So its approach MUST be different.

More different than I think you even try to understand. We have a workable system, where every user is the moderator of their own personal subreddit on every single subject. We don't allow anyone to add tags to any posts, we allow anyone who has participated in the community by a negligible amount to do so.

So I reiterate: this is not a "fail" scenario, never was, never will be. This is a "refinement" scenario and I maintain that the system is fully functional within the parameters being discussed.