Automod is what I was thinking of when I said I thought Reddit has some tools to do this. The problem, like I mentioned above, is one of scale. Automod is not capable of making judgments about post quality; it can't do anything to enforce a "must be something someone said" rule, for example. Nor is it capable of flagging the many, many variants of the same low-effort submission we frequently get (not without a lot of false positives, at least). That's what my blog's curation team does, and what takes the most time. We can manage the blog's former peak submission rate of 25-35 per day, but given the nature of Reddit I expect that number would skyrocket, overwhelming the mod team.
Modmail isn't public, is it? It's only viewable to the sub's mods. If it isn't public, then it is not equivalent to asks.
And why would you move your blog to Reddit without curation team? It seems that Reddit does technically the same as Tumblr, you just have to move your site there and ask you mod team follow.
> but given the nature of Reddit I expect that number would skyrocket, overwhelming the mod team.
That's very, very unlikely to happen. People start their own subreddits and want more people, but it's just as painful to grow the number of subscribers as everywhere else.
Like I said in the original post, a transfer to Reddit is not impossible, but it would be a significant effort, and it would definitely kill the blog's personality. Even if the curation team comes along, even if the submission numbers don't skyrocket beyond what the team is capable of handling, Reddit lacks a lot of other small features that give the blog personality. If/when Tumblr goes under, I'd prefer to allow my blog to end gracefully rather than trying to port it over to a platform that isn't quite a match.
Modmail isn't public, is it? It's only viewable to the sub's mods. If it isn't public, then it is not equivalent to asks.