It feels like a mistake to ask for volunteers, since only people with way too much time on their hands coupled with an eagerness to go on a power trip will likely respond to that opportunity, i.e. college kids and people who are unemployed.

Users who are respectable and reasonable are also going to have a lot of other responsibilities, and so won't be able to give you much time. That's asking for abuse and/or poor review decisions, which is a problem Reddit's always had with its moderators.

I always like how the old site Slashdot did it, and more recently the Stackexchange sites. "Content admins" were randomly selected from users with karma over some threshold, and allowed to review a few posts. And then their privilege expired and wouldn't renew for some set period of time. Sort of like US jury duty.

That strategy seems like a good way to balance finding those with the time and resources to donate to the site while limiting the potential for abuse.

At worst, it ends up functioning exactly like this post, an open call for volunteers, only automated, so the admins don't have to waste their time manually vetting anyone. At best, it's even better at finding a wider range of users who might not have seen the admin post who can donate some small amount of time, if not much.