Are there sites that have done this at scale? Reddit and Wikipedia come to mind as counter examples, where the people with the most time and desire for power end up doing almost all the moderation.
I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits was a good try, and solved some things, but it doesn't get around the sorts of problems being discussed in this overall thread.
(I'm only talking about what the case is, in this context, not why, nor judging it at the moment.)
Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they could play a more effective card were they to be banned.
And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.
That may be somewhat due to policy changes. Reddit did try to be more hands-off in the past.
But perhaps a better example than reddit is the internet as a whole. ISP and hosters are dumb carriers and moderation is mostly left to the individual sites. Depending on your hoster it may take a court order for them to do anything at all.
In other words we need more platforms that put themselves front and center, avoiding that also avoids the reputation problems with a hands-off approach.
Many city, state, and even country subreddits have been taken over by right-wing moderators. This has been a coordinated process over many years. And while you can create new subreddit for your country easily you're still can't be /r/canada.
