Great article! What struck me was how difficult it is to automate such "policing" tasks and how much work is put in to keeping a community on track. I'm always trying to automate things but I guess in this case it's not so simple.
"... I was hoping for an insight into some cool algorithm they use, instead I get a piece of puffery ..."
If you want to read about the precise, analytical technology that by and large has been solved - yesterdays news then try Cal Hendersons blog ~ http://iamcal.com/talks Hendo has some excellent talks on massive scaling, unicode filtering, how to build cheap & fast, etc. If you want to read about the messy, yet to be solved problems that could really use a technological hand this is the type of article you should be reading.
Once the most of the easier technical problems are solved you are left with the hard ones to solve ones. Well written stories like this one about those "messy, hard to predict humans" and their complex interactions in Web Apps as big as Flickr are unexplored territory. Read here for more on this thread:
