Reputation tracking is the key. The most simple option is open-invite invite-only spaces: Any user can invite more users, but only users with an invite can participate. Most Discord servers work like this, secret societies like the Oddfellows do, as does the other site.
If you keep track of the invite tree, you can "prune" it as needed to reduce moderation load: low quality users don't tend to be the source of high-quality users, and in the cases where they are, those high quality users tend find other people willing to vouch for them faster than their inviter catches a ban.
This is remarkably useful. Even ignoring the built-in commands (which are handy in their own right), I find the button's action being self-described in the html ("tell this element to do this") far more pleasant to read than the normal see button -> /document.getElementById("buttonID") -> scroll back up to the html to figure out what elements are referred to in the script.