Um, I don’t think I was advocating any particular level of moderation, was I? More like visibility into its processes amd motivations, and that providing those convincingly and to an appropriate extent is the moderators’ responsibility. Dang’s please-stop-this essays here come to mind, for example—even if not everybody can be dang and not every community would be moved by such essays.

(There are moderation practices that I disapprove of and are not coincidentally outright incompatible with the view I expressed. Like the advice to just ban the user if you dislike interacting with them or if they’re complaining about suppression—especially in a small community like that advice was targeted at, I know I’d be more or less unsalvageably bitter after witnessing this in practice, let alone being its target. But it’s still not the strength that upsets me in this hypothetical, it’s more the perceived arbitrariness. Which, if the moderator is not in fact being arbitrary, is again a communication problem, not a policy one.)

Moderation is overhead, but so is Postgres. Both are very useful solutions to real and difficult problems. Both still have to pay for themselves with some mix of user-visible shinies and keeping out of the way instead of grumbling about how difficult the problem is. The correct choice of that mix is highly situational and I don’t pretend to have the panacea in that respect.