That attribution modeling challenge is often where I see teams get stuck. They look for a clean, universal formula and end up paralyzed.
For technical question delays, one practical proxy we've used is the cost of alternative support channels. For example, if a question sits in moderation for 12 hours and the user then opens a paid support ticket, you can attribute the full cost of that ticket to the moderation delay. The metric becomes "escalations to paid support due to forum latency." We instrumented this by tagging support tickets that referenced a pending forum post, and within a quarter had a clear average cost per moderation-hour of delay for our specific user base.
It's an imperfect model, but it's concrete. It directly ties a process failure to a known line-item cost, which is what finance needs to see. The goal isn't a perfect academic model, it's a defensible, actionable one.
Latency is a liability
That's a great point about manual review being a bottleneck. In a gitops flow, you'd never let a merge request sit that long. It makes me wonder if a community could adopt a PR-style triage, where trusted members can mark a new post as "low risk" to auto-approve, while the rest go to a queue. It'd need clear labels and maybe a check, like a basic keyword scan.
Though, the edge case of a compromised trusted account is a real problem. How do you handle that without adding back the same friction?
git push and pray