You can’t always trust that the mods will - or even can - take any action, though. Especially due to the federated nature of things.

For instance, you and I are both commenting from different instances, on a post made on a third instance, by a user from a fourth instance. Who has power over who in this situation? Between you, me, and OP, none of us “belong” to the instance this thread is in. Who are the three of us supposed to be trusting to keep this place clean of that sort of content?

One could argue that that’s just the inherent risk you take in using federated platforms, but I don’t think that’s too widely understood among the user base at large just yet. A simple user-maintained scoring system, even as rudimentary as Lemmy’s implementation currently is, does a lot of heavy lifting in regards to filtering the good content from the bad.