again rather than discussing the need for certain mods....why do we need them at all?....dialogue anyone

I suppose the strongest argument in favour of mods would be that some material has to be removed. Say illegal links. Now you could have a system where x number of "Report"s or whatever automatically removes a comment, and then the mod power would be given to the users. But that would leave you pretty vulnerable to brigading. Or just to inappropriate threads appearing in a sub where yes they get upvotes, but they clearly don't fulfill the requirements to be on that sub. Or some user has a long history of being rude and spamming, but nothing is illegal, so you can't really call for admin action.

It's a tough question. I think communities should be able to boot mods, but I don't think we should do away with them altogether. Full disclosure: My main account is a /v/science mod, and I've been yelled at repeatedly for deleting links to pseudoscience.