Why moderation of an online community should be done by the volunteers not by software?
People tend to distrust platforms where moderation decisions are done by algorithms. Rule violations always are counter-intuitive for the users who made them, at least on an emotional level. When the decision is made by algorithm there is nobody to appeal to or even simply talk about the case. This makes the users feel like they were treated unfairly. The final decision on whether some moderation action is necessary should always be made by real people. Automation is possible, though, in some exceptional cases, like when algorithms help to identify content that should be reviewed by the users or spam detention and removal.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.