Recall elections (maybe with a high threshold required to remove a mod) might be a viable solution. Say you have:
An annual "airing of grievances" thread where -- if the community has a problem with a mod -- they can petition for a recall election for that individual mod. You need to get some percentage of the community to upvote a petition for each mod they want to vote on.
If a petition successfully gains the requisite number of upvotes, you automatically have a recall election for that mod in 1 month.
It takes a significantly higher threshold of upvotes to actually remove the mod via recall.
You could limit voting to users who have, say, at least 6-month-old accounts and 50+ comments. For whoever is nominated to replace a recalled mod you could require a more extensive history.
There's no foolproof way to prevent bad-faith actors from taking over, but you can make it a lot harder without dreaming up something too complicated.
Recall elections (maybe with a high threshold required to remove a mod) might be a viable solution. Say you have:
You could limit voting to users who have, say, at least 6-month-old accounts and 50+ comments. For whoever is nominated to replace a recalled mod you could require a more extensive history.
There's no foolproof way to prevent bad-faith actors from taking over, but you can make it a lot harder without dreaming up something too complicated.