Yep, there's not a whole lot of incentive for most people to spend their time doing it. It's also one of those things that feels like "someone else" will pick up the slack, so it's not a big deal if you don't participate.

I recently tried to dedicate more of my time to reporting, and I had my first experience with one of my reports being marked as "bad". That's cool, an opportunity to learn I guess (I like LoyceV's perspective on "bad" reports). But I was just getting started (only 197 reports) so I didn't have access to the view that would allow me to see which one it was. All I could do from my end was go through my local record of reports (I keep a text file) and then follow up on each of them (i.e. see which ones were handled and which ones weren't), to try to determine which one was "bad".

I picked a small handful that I thought would be likely candidates, and I was pretty disappointed by what I found. For example, one of the reports was to do with a string of 6 posts, and the mod that handled it only merged the last two posts for some reason (by no logic that I could ascertain, each of them was short and only separated by a few minutes). Another was someone that posted the same thing twice in a row, except that the second post included an additional question, and the mod deleted the longer of the two posts.

Maybe I'm super unlucky, but finding two cases like that after only checking ~10 of my reports doesn't exactly inspire confidence, you know? (That the mods are performing their duties with due care, that is.)

Now that I'm aware that there's a non-negligible chance that my future reports will be quickly skimmed and then mishandled, I'm struggling to find the motivation to keep doing it...

I don't think I'll pick it up again (I can't abide by sloppy moderation), but on a brighter note, if there's ever a consensus on how to motivate people to get into reporting (i.e. reporter badges, or something similar), then I'll happily donate the dev time required to implement it (I think reporter badges based on some variant of the "rMerit/rPoints" idea will end up working out quite nicely; some of my thoughts on that are here, and here).