A harassment campaign on Goodreads

Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up.

This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?

I'm scanning my memory banks and Stackoverflow is the only "earned privilege" community that comes to mind and my experience with it has been uniformly unpleasant, let's say "bordering on toxic". If anything, automatically earned privilege creates competition which makes everything worst and nastier.

In contrast, I moderate a medium sized FB group in a topic that often has trolling. We eliminate it entirely through hand-picked moderators and a zero tolerance statement. There's no competition to be a moderator and there's actually little for the moderators to do since making things clear mostly works. So there's no competition for anything and people spend their time discussing issues instead.

HN seems to be closer to that situation also - with karma hidden, competition is pretty limited. And anonymous posters can make fine contributions here.