How come when people report something to the mod's in a community a one person can take care of it? Instead shouldn't it be voted on to remove content by the majority mod team?

If someone posts something truly offensive or illegal, it doesn’t make sense to schedule a meeting next Thursday when a quorum can be gathered to vote on whether or not to remove it.

Rules are rules, and if you don’t trust someone to enforce the rules without having their hand held, they shouldn’t be the enforcer.

Mistakes will be made. Moderation is never entirely perfect. If one person keeps making mistakes, they should be removed.

Each mod has been granted the same responsibility, to deal with issues promptly. Whichever one sees the problem and responds to it first is just as entrusted by the community as any other mod.

If you feel that a specific mod is not capable of making decisions for the good of the group, then there should be a discussion about whether that person should be a mod.

If you sometimes disagree with the decisions made by other mods, just let it go. You won’t agree with everyone 100% of the time. Leaving or deleting one post isn’t the end of the world. If you notice consistent bad calls, then see above.

Mods are volunteers, and therefore will moderate however they feel like. The needs of the community might influence what that looks like, but at the end of the day it’s whatever they want.

Reacting in a timely manner but also requiring a majority are both things that we want to see, but they’re also conflicting ideals. Depending on the size of the community it may be an impossible ask.

If a moderator oversteps, the rest of the mod team could take action. If you can’t trust a single moderator to moderate, then maybe they shouldn’t be a moderator.

It’s not a perfect system, but things rarely rare.

I imagine it’s very hard to moderate effectively any other way. A moderation team should be on the same page, and believe that other moderators are acting in good faith. Generally, this means moderators take action justified by established rules and/or guidelines, and document their justification should review be required.

Requiring voting for every, or most actions is a monumental amount of time consuming administration work, as most moderators have other obligations, and live across time zones. Moderator action being required is, inherently, because an act in the community is deemed to be harmful to a community or it’s intended purpose. Swift action is especially important when the act is illegal, or dangerous (exploitation media, doxxing, etc).

A voting system is counterintuitive to the intent of moderation. Communities and forums, both physical and ethereal, are not democracies. Each is created with an intent, here in the ‘lemmyverse’ that intent is often to promote discussion. If I founded a crochet group, and the members decided to instead perform seances during meets, the group would no longer serve it’s purpose. Hierarchy of some kind developing is also unavoidable in any relationship; but a positive hierarchy is understood by those within it to be productive, and well intentioned.

Voting systems are not immune to power imbalances, especially when alternate accounts and moderator inactivity are present. Votes enforced on a software level may be manipulated, or held in a permanent limbo. Whereas unenforced votes don’t mean much other than polling opinion, which is already an option, and already relies on trust in the moderators. Members of a community should trust one another enough to feel empowered to bring up concerns.

TL:DR Nothing is perfect, but healthy communities are built on trust, and no level of enforcement changes that. In a healthy ecosystem, people are free to stop engaging where they do not have that trust, and are empowered to promote positive change. The fediverse is built on this principle, as netizens and communities alike must have trust in their admins, and that same trust applies to every step in the hierarchy. It is also practically impossible due to organisational constraints, or undue demand of volunteer moderators’ time.

Luckily the stakes are mega low. If someone makes a poor mod decision, that’s easy to reverse. If you want a team’s members each able to work independently but aligned, then you achieve consensus by other means: front-loading the work of creating a shared understanding such that any independent decision made according to the shared understanding would be stable regardless of which team member made it. Ultimately, this is a process relying on trust and cooperation. If a team member violates that trust or plays poorly with others, there should be a process or result. And what this consequence is should be baked in at the create-shared-understanding phase so there is no excuse for bad behavior within the team and an easy out if there are problems.

Because of the way it was built. You could make your own version that does what you want though.