Quoting myself:
To be clear: everyone here is a "moderator" (your "mod power" is proportional to your Steem Power). Perhaps it's a bad name for those upper tiers. I like it because people immediately understand that mods have influence.
The issue is that other platforms have given mods a bad name as of late..
Does this make sense? "mod" and "supermod" are just display names for specific (higher) levels of commitment to the platform. I'm not proposing they have extra powers on the blockchain. This is all on the UI/UX layer. Just some perks/tools on the site perhaps -- like the reddit enhancement suite.